sonicwarfareath

[sonicwarfareath]

Big love!

[sonicwarfareath]

Racism 2.0 by Éric Laurent The recent debates surrounding the ban of Dieudonné’s show in France are producing a very contemporary echo of what Lacan foretold[i] with respect to the function of psychoanalysis in civilisation. The closing words of Seminar XIX, in June 1972, were firmly levelled at what lies ahead of us. According to Lacan, our emergence from the patriarchal civilisation of yesteryear was now beyond doubt. The post-1968 period was still buzzing with talk of the end of paternal power and the advent of a new society of brothers, accompanied by the blithe hedonism of a new religion of the body. Lacan played the party pooper, specifying a consequence that hadn’t yet been noticed: When we come back to the root of the body, if we are to reassert the value of the word brother, […] you should know that what rises up, the ultimate consequences of which have yet to be seen – and which takes root in the body, in the fraternity of the body – is racism.[ii] Body idolatry has very different consequences from the narcissistic hedonism to which some thought they could limit this ‘religion of the body’. These consequences foreshadow other forms of religion besides the secular religions, as Raymond Aron put it, which haunted this period and which, to Aron’s thinking, were peddling the ‘Opium of the Intellectuals’.[iii]Whilst Lacan was predicting the rise of racism, which he was stressing insistently as of 1967 and through into the ’seventies, the prevailing atmosphere was rather one of delight at the prospect of integrating nations into larger ensembles that would be authorised by ‘common markets’. At that time, people were more in favour of Europe than they are today. Lacan accentuated this unexpected consequence with a precision that back then came as something of a surprise. Questioning Lacan in ‘Television’ (1973), Jacques-Alain Miller was a sounding board for this surprise, highlighting the importance of his thesis: ‘What gives you the confidence to prophesy the rise of racism? And why the devil do you have to speak of it?’ Lacan replied: Because it doesn’t strike me as funny and yet, it’s true.With our jouissance going off track, only the Other is able to mark its position, but only in so far as we are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies – unheard of before the melting pot.[iv] The logic that Lacan develops is as follows. We have no knowledge of the jouissance from which we might take our orientation. We know only how to reject the jouissance of others. With this ‘melting pot’, Lacan is criticising the twofold movement of colonialism and the will to normalise he who has been displaced, the immigrant, in the name of all that is supposed to be for his own ‘good’. Leaving the Other to his own mode of jouissance, that would only be possible by not imposing our own on him, by not thinking of him as underdeveloped.[…] How can we hope that the empty forms of humanhysterianism [humanitairerie] disguising our extortions can continue to last?[v] This is not culture shock, but the shock of different forms of jouissance. This manifold jouissance splits the social bond apart, hence the temptation of calling upon a unifying God.            Lacan also heralds something else here: the return of different forms of religious fundamentalism. ‘Even if God, thus newly strengthened, should end up ex-sisting, this bodes nothing better than a return of his baneful past.’ In these comments on the logic of racism, Lacan takes into account the varying forms of the rejected object, distinct forms that range from pre-war anti-Semitism (which led to Nazi radicalism) to post-colonial racism directed at immigrants. Racism effectively switches its objects as the social forms undergo modification. From Lacan’s perspective, however, there is always, in any human community, a rejection of an inassimilable jouissance, which forms the mainspring of a possible barbarism.            Before ‘Television’, Lacan has raised the question of racism in his ‘Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School’ and in his ‘Address on Child Psychoses’ of the same year. In the ‘Proposition…’, he mentions the precursory aspect of Nazi barbarism: Let me summarise by saying that what we have seen emerge from this, to our horror, represents the reaction of precursors in relation to what will unfold as a consequence of the rearranging of social groupings by science and, notably, of the universalisation science introduces into them.            Our future as common markets will be balanced by an increasingly hard-line extension of the process of segregation.[vi] In the ‘Address on Child Psychoses’ he specifies the nexus between the position of the psychoanalyst and the movement of civilisation: ‘we need to know what the rest of us, I mean psychoanalysts, are going to respond [to] segregation, which has been put on the agenda by an unprecedented subversion.’[vii]            The logic by which Lacan constructs all human ensembles, of any shape whatsoever, actually gives a twist to Freud’s Massenpsychologie. In 1921, after formulating the second topography that organises psychical reality, Freud looked again at the question of the destiny of the drive, starting off from the fate of identification which governs psychical life in a decisive way: In opposition to the usual practice, we shall not choose a relatively simple group formation as our point of departure, but shall begin with highly organised, lasting and artificial groups. The most interesting example of such structures are churches – communities of believers – and armies.[…]            We should consider whether groups with leaders may not be the more primitive and complete, whether in the others an idea, an abstraction, may not be substituted for the leader (a state of things to which religious groups, with their invisible head, form a transition stage), and whether a common tendency, a wish in which a number of people can have a share, may not in the same way serve as a substitute. […] Hatred against a particular person or institution might operate in just the same unifying way.[viii] For Freud, hatred and racist rejection form a bond, but remain connected to the leader who takes the place of the father, or, more accurately, the place of the father’s murder. The limitless dimension of this requirement lives on in the group, and the establishment of the social bond remains founded upon the base of the identificatory drive. A stable group harbours within it the same principle of limitlessness that was isolated for the primal group. In this way, Freud was able to account both for the army as an organised mass and for the savage power of killing that accompanies it. A common hate can unify a group, which remains bound to a segregative identification with the leader.            When Lacan constructs the logic of the social bond, he does not begin with the identification with the leader, but with an initial rejection at the level of the drive. His formulation of logical time concludes with the proposition that all human assimilation follows three temporal phases through which the subject and the social Other are articulated: 1. A man knows what is not a man;2. Men recognise themselves among themselves;3. I declare myself to be a man for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man.[ix] These temporal phases do not set off from some knowledge of what it would be to be a man, followed by a process of identification. Rather, this logic sets off from what is not a man – A man knows what is not a man. This says nothing of what a man is. Next, men recognise themselves amongst themselves on account of being men: they know not what they do, but they recognise themselves in each other. Lastly, I declare myself to be a man. Here lies the whole question of the affirmation or the decision that is linked to the function of hatred, the function of anxiety – for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man.This collective logic is grounded on the threat of a primordial rejection, on the menace of a form of racism: a man knows what is not a man. And this is a question of jouissance. He whom I reject for having a jouissance distinct from my own is not a man. This movement provides the logical form of all ‘human’ assimilation, precisely in so far as it posits itself as assimilative of a barbarism, but which nonetheless reserves the essential determination of the ‘I’…[x] When Lacan wrote this text, Nazi barbarism was close at hand. It began by pointing the finger at the Jew as he whose jouissance is not the same as the Aryan’s: a man is not a man because his jouissance is not like mine. The flipside of this is that, within this logic, it may be asserted that whilst men do not know the nature of their jouissance, men do know what barbarism is. Thenceforth, men recognise themselves amongst themselves, but they don’t really know how. Then, subjectively, one by one: I am caught in a movement of haste. I declare myself to be a man, out of fear that I will be denounced for not being a man. Based on an absence of any definition of being-a-man, this collective logic will tie together the ‘I that declares’ and the ‘set of men’, and in doing so will bypass the leader.            

This logical form was to be pursued throughout Lacan’s work. It later became more complex with the theory of desire and the theory of jouissance, but it would continue functioning, as is the case in the logic of the Pass. The logic of the constitution of a psychoanalytic collective was to be approached in keeping with this same anti-identificatory logic, or more accurately, a logic of non-segregative identifications, as Jacques-Alain Miller called them in his ‘Turin Theory’[xi]. 1. A psychoanalyst knows what is not a psychoanalyst – on no account does this mean that the psychoanalyst knows what a psychoanalyst is.2. Psychoanalysts recognise themselves amongst themselves as psychoanalysts – this is what is asked in the experience of the Pass: for a cartel to recognise this fellow here as one of us.3. To present himself for the Pass, the subject must declare himself, to decide, to be a psychoanalyst and to run the risk of not convincing the others than he is a psychoanalyst.[xii] In his ‘Proposition…’, Lacan insisted on the dimension of racism in order to stress that any human ensemble harbours in its depths a jouissance that goes off track, a fundamental not-knowing with respect to the jouissance that would correspond to identification. The psychoanalyst is simply he who has to find this out in order to constitute the community of those who recognise themselves as psychoanalysts.            

The malicious jouissance at stake in racist discourse is the failure to recognise this logic. It is the fundament of any social bond. The founding crime is not the murder of the father, but the will to murder he who embodies the jouissance that I reject. Therefore, antiracism always has to be reinvented in keeping with each fresh form of the object of racism, which looses its shape with the rearrangements of social groupings. However, our history has shown in particular, behind each guise of racism, the central place of anti-Semitism as both a precursor and a horizon. Here I shall cite Bernard-Henri Lévy’s analysis of the new form of what is coming our way: Anti-Semitism has a history. Over the ages it has taken on different forms, but they each correspond to what the spirit of the times was willing or able to hear. I believe that, for reasons that it would be impossible to detail here, the only anti-Semitism that could possibly ‘work’ in this day and age, the only one capable of abusing and mobilising a broad swathe of women and men, as it did in other periods, is one that can tie together the threefold thread of anti-Zionism (Jews who support a ‘deadly Israel’), negationism (an unscrupulous people capable of inventing or exploiting the martyrdom of its own so as to reach its goals), and competitive victimhood (the memory of the Holocaust functioning as a screen over other massacres across the planet). Well, Dieudonné was in the process of joining all three.[xiii] The astonishing response that Nicolas Bedos has directed at Dieudonné has opened a further question as to the status of the comedian who, in our civilisation of mass democratic individualism, goes straight for the stomach. Besides, the stomach is not enough. These days it takes all the viscera to make oneself heard. This brings with it an unexpected consequence: television is losing its softness as a medium, with everyone edging towards the violence of the internet. Translated from the French by A. R. Price

[sonicwarfareath]

My podcast for #Beatnik, a blend of drone ambient, slow beat and industrial sounds, that lets me to speak about music as a personal discourse of time, the one that susbstitutes the unpredictable time with a time rythmic, classified and manipulated.

[sonicwarfareath]

Last session w/ MarcelDune   https://www.facebook.com/cannibalradio/videos/1342490125893999/UzpfSTEwMDAwMzIyODU3NTE0MTozMDYwNjExMjk0OTk0MTQ6MTA6MDoxNTU0MTAxOTk5OjY5NDUzMDA3MjM3Mjc1MDQ2OTM/

[sonicwarfareath]

A radical formula about courage may say: women have courage and men are cowards. This is to be understood from the phallic reference, according to whether or not one has the organ that, in the body, embodies the phallic signifier: men have something to protect. A man is an owner. He is essentially an owner. He will manage his property in better or worse ways, but he is conditioned by it. Women, with respect to phallic reference, have nothing to lose. Having nothing to lose can grant a courage without limits, even a ferocious one: women who, to save what’s most precious, are prepared to go to the end without stopping, ready to fight as they want.It is true that the feeling of a handicap can lead to the position of victim, of complaint or fear, but it is in the woman where the sudden inversion of fear into a courage without limit is observed; when one touches what must be respected, one can see the most fearful of women suddenly become a heroine.

The fundamental cowardice of men lies in that they are encumbered by something they have to protect, and this can awake in them the ferocity of the owner threatened with theft; but it is men who like to negotiate, to dialectize all that in order to protect what needs to be protected. This is very different from talking [speaking].

If you think about what Hegel called the "struggle for pure prestige", which gives rise to the positions of master and slave, it might appear that men come out as masters and women submit, but that is not the case. Man, although it may seem that he commands, is the slave, the servant. This is because, from a structural viewpoint, the one who leaves the struggle as the slave is the one who must protect something (in Hegel, supposedly his own life). But if the feminine subject has already lost everything and has nothing to protect, she is in the structural position of the master. The will despised as senselessness, as whim, is on the side of the woman. [...]

Thus, to define a compass on the question of courage, we must base ourselves on the relationship between courage and castration. Courage is always located in the crossing of the barrier of horror to femininity. There is courage when this barrier is crossed. The two sexes have the horror of femininity, but men more than women.

Then there is also a cowardice of women in the horror of femininity, which has to do with protecting their image and, eventually, the beauty of their image, as the last protection before the horror of castration. This barrier that constitutes the cult of the beautiful image, of what one supposedly wants to be for at least one man -which also makes the cult of his image-, is what regularly makes it more difficult for women than for men to speak publicly. Speaking in public means sacrificing something of the protection of the image, of the fetish of the image.

The cowardice of men is the cowardice that is well hidden, they are so cowardly that they hide cowardice itself; that is to say that they go fighting in a place other than in the relationship of the sexes: in the field of knowledge, they debate, they underline typographical errors in theses or, further down the line, when they are really concerned about their manhood, they become militars. [...] This is a way to seek the insignia of ‘officers of virility’ precisely to flee from the other battlefield, from the fundamental battlefield, from the battlefield of men and women. 

Thus, sexual courage is the same as epistemic courage, it is confronting the Other sex insofar as the feminine is the Other sex also for women. As Lacan says, woman is Other for herself.If one takes as a starting point that the fundamental phenomenon is the horror of femininity, then one understands that the fear of the father is something that covers that horror. It is better to be afraid of the father, so that one does not know that the horror is in fact of femininity;  this way we see that the terrible father is always, once it is analysed, a kind of puppet that comes to cover the fundamental horror. Jacques-Alain Miller

[sonicwarfareath]

My set for Lower Parts draft @ Romantso, Athens. Enjoy

[sonicwarfareath]

Lower Parts Draft at Romantso

Saturday night/ some freaked electronics / all night long w/ brilliant partners. Stop by with your body and mind/

[sonicwarfareath]

Eradicating presence.//

  AIDS was probably the first postmodern event to inaugurate the definitive consolidation of biopolitics and the appropriation of the concept of risk by the State with the aim of introducing a regulation, an ordering, and even a prophylaxis of subjectivity. Threatened by a pandemic of proportions unprecedented since the era of the great European plagues, and following a first period of perplexity and dread, the Western subject learned to add a new concern to the shadows that hovered over him from the political realm.

When, twenty years later, the Al Qaeda operation against the Twin Towers was broadcast live by all audiovisual media on the planet, the subject (who in the meantime had mutated, his Western identity dissolving into the undefined and euphemistic magma of “global society”) came to realize that from then on risk (his eternal and not always visible traveling companion) had become converted into the only dogma of faith to which he could cling.

In losing in an almost definitive manner its political function, the State has become administrator, manager and supervisor of the fabulous risk industry, driven by the alliance between techno-science and capital, a compact that consists in turning fear into an object of consumption, into a justification for obedience and into a good argument for organizing new crusades of salvation.

At this point, one cannot help perceiving the inversion of the sublimatory process that, according to Jacques Lacan, constituted one of the most extraordinary creations of culture: the fear of God, capable of “replacing innumerable fears by the fear of a unique being […] It was necessary that someone invent it and propose to men, as a remedy for a world made up of manifold terrors […]”[1].

The “risk society“, in contrast, returns the contemporary subject to the most primitive feeling of helplessness in the face of a multiplication of dangers and fears that in turn are carefully promoted and disseminated, to the point that the demand for security has become an imperious claim and a new market value. Risk will have to be measured, predicted, assessed, even mathematicized in commercial figures, in order to finally become the fundamental rationale of economic, military, policing, sanitary and judicial strategies.

The subject must train himself in the recognition and acceptance that his life is definitively besieged by innumerable real dangers from which he must be protected by policies that – unfortunately, but for his own good… – will require a progressive loss of rights and freedoms. Beyond what is supposed by this treatment of castration in terms of the perverse instrumentalization of the political function, it implies a radical distance from the ethics of psychoanalysis.

If for Lacan desire is what justifies the effort to live “when life does not turn someone into a coward”[2], existence conceived as the minimization, prevention and management of risk entails the enthronement of solitude and isolation as ways of access to a jouissance which one tries to purge of all connotation of loss. In the end, war by remote-control and love via WhatsApp are based on a common logic: to eradicate presence.

By Gustavo Dessal 

Repost from: http://www.thelacanianreviews.com/the-dream-of-living-with-no-risks/?fbclid=IwAR3GyPjMvelIsrJi6eF4D71nOaFWAqTLq9GrHenwfYk94Fhkw3UOI6BduvA

Translated by Florencia F.C. Shanahan

[sonicwarfareath]

To What Degree has the tension between Human Rights and claims to State Sovereignty been resolved in the contemporary World? An essay about global human rights, trying to figure out the real relationship with state sovereignty.     

“Human rights can push and pull in multiple directions, Human rights law can be used both to challenge and to reinforce the power of state sovereignty. It can be ignored by sovereign states and it can itself also be shaped by the interests of those same states. Thus, I would argue that despite developments at the trans-national level and the establishment of global human rights 'norms', the relationship between human rights and state sovereignty is complex and the tension that Hannah Arendt highlighted remains to this day.” http://www.academia.edu/5445096/To_What_Degree_has_the_tension_between_Human_Rights_and_claims_to_State_Sovereignty_been_resolved_in_the_contemporary_World

[sonicwarfareath]

Phormix welcomes Francesco Baudazzi's latest musical expression under Diana Berti's persona. ‘Les 400 coups’ goes some way to establishing that there was something worth remembering about what could be termed as a nostalgic ‘consensus’.  Here, you are transported into the inviting interior of oneirically pulp memories from a dreamed past. Deterritorialization, like you could be anywhere, and reterritorialization at the same time, as if you are in shinily familar surroundings. An extensive fictional soundscape is being constructed by using cinematic voices, juxtaposed with the repeated synth beat that forms the track. Diana Berti's ambiguities derive from a habitual distortion of time, inversion of characters, and creation of ironic, dreamlike worlds that are mired in crisis. While these ambiguities could be explored from numerous angles, it's this cinematic imagination and the crucial role of fantasy that help and move beyond the particular crises of jouissance, experienced in everyday life. Text : Sonic Warfare

Artist: Diana Berti Title: Les 400 Coups Label: Amok Tapes Release Date: 2.11. 2018 Format: Cassette Pre-order: bit.ly/2zeUgKx

[sonicwarfareath]

Beau Wanzer's return to L.I.E.S. Records designates his radical and innovative route in electronic music. The artist's album consists of five tracks that establish his unique sound. One of these,  Wick Hunny, brings us in mind Donna Haraway's clear sighted observation that "our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert". This remark poses a challenge that Beau Wanzer's composition accepts and overcomes. It is this living continuum that is maintained through repetitive synth beats and drum machine jams, along with an essence of materialism in terms closer to horror fiction through hypnotic vocals. The kind of fiction with which the listener will be concerned, implies that these industrial narratives combine spaces of imaginative desires, phantasmatic qualities and reality principles. Wick Hunny brings something familiar and old-established in mind, giving the subject the opportunity to dive into the unconscious, precisely because it is a matter of fear. At the same time, the listener can follow the continuation of the living rythm dialectically, by displacing the relation between human and the machines from some of its existing obtuse associations, activated your brown cells in your brain. Text : Sonic Warfare

Artist : Beau Wanzer Title : Wick Hunny Label : L.I.E.S Records Release: October 2018 Buy : liesrecords.com/products/beau-wan…r-s-t-12-lies-121

[sonicwarfareath]

Lux Rec releases the first EP from Lausanne born, Zurich based musician, 808Hz. It consists of 4 tracks, one of which is "Noise Debris". The record takes us to a specific place, signified by aural components, such as pounding relentless drum beats, out of this world tones and noise drops that slice the track. They refer to some initial experiments in industrial music, like musique concrete, synthesizers and sequencers. The sound leaks, moving from those grounded drums into unpredictable noises, leading us to new, post apocalyptic inner scapes. A tracks that transforms itself every time you will listen to it activating the powder electric blue side of your brain.

Artist : 808 HZ Title : Noise Debris Label : Lux Rec Release: Date : 24 September 2018 Pre-order: luxrec.bandcamp.com/album/sound-control Text: Sonic Warfare

[sonicwarfareath]

All language implies a metalanguage, its already a metalanguage of its own register, or not?

[sonicwarfareath]

Node live performance of Terminus at Paddington Station sonic panoramas from the mid-90s. Compelling melodies straight from the hearts of classic analogue synths, modulars, and others. Bringing back the analogue equipment in a public space, with its unqiue ambience and background noise

[sonicwarfareath]

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher

It must have been 1994 when I first saw Rufige Kru’s ‘Ghosts Of My Life’ on the shelves of a high street record store. The four-track EP had been released in 1993, but this was a time – before internet hype and online discographies – when the traces of the underground took longer to surface. The EP was a prime example of darkside Jungle. Jungle was a moment in what Simon Reynolds would come to call the ‘hardcore continuum’: the series of mutations on the British dance music underground triggered by the introduction of the breakbeat into Rave, passing from hardcore Rave into Jungle, Speed Garage, 2-step. I’ll always prefer the name Jungle to the more pallid and misleading term drum and bass, because much of the allure of the genre came from the fact that no drums or bass guitar were played. Instead of simulating the already-existing qualities of ‘real’ instruments, digital technology was exploited to produce sounds that had no pre-existing correlates. The function of timestretching – which allowed the time signature of a sound to be changed, without its pitch being altered –transformed sampled breakbeats into rhythms that no human could play. Producers would also use the strange metallic excrescence that was produced when samples were slowed down and the software had to fill in the gaps. The result was an abstract rush that made chemicals all but redundant: accelerating our metabolisms, heightening our expectations, reconstructing our nervous systems. It is also worth holding onto the name Jungle because it evokes a terrain: the urban Jungle, or rather the underside of a metropolis that was just in the process of being digitalised. It has sometimes seemed as if the use of the word ‘urban’ is a polite synonym for ‘black’ music. Yet it’s possible to hear ‘urban’, not as some disavowal of race, but as an invocation of the powers of cosmopolitan conviviality. At the same time, however, Jungle was by no means an unequivocal celebration of the urban. If Jungle celebrated anything, it was the lure of the dark. Jungle liberated the suppressed libido in the dystopian impulse, releasing and amplifying the jouissance that comes from anticipating the annihilation of all current certainties. As Kodwo Eshun argued, in Jungle there was a libidinisation of anxiety itself, a transformation of fight and flight impulses into enjoyment. This was deeply ambivalent: at one level, what we were hearing here was a kind of sonic fictional intensification and extrapolation of the neoliberal world’s destruction of solidarity and security. Nostalgia for the familiarity of smalltown life was rejected in Jungle, but its digital city was devoid of the comfort of strangers: no-one could be trusted here. Jungle took many of its cues from the Hobbesian scenarios of 1980s films such as Blade Runner, Terminator and Predator 2. It’s no accident that all three of these films are about hunting. Jungle’s world was one in which entities – human as well as nonhuman – stalked each other for sport as well as for sustenance. Yet darkside Jungle was about the thrill of the chased, about the videogame euphoria–anxiety of eluding ruthless predators, as much as it was about the exhilaration of running prey to ground. At another level, darkside Jungle projected the very future that capital can only disavow. Capital can never openly admit that it is a system based on inhuman rapacity; the Terminator can never remove its human mask. Jungle not only ripped the mask off, it actively identified with the inorganic circuitry beneath: hence the android/ death’s head that Rufige Kru used as their logo. The paradoxical identification with death, and the equation of death with the inhuman future was more than a cheap nihilist gesture. At a certain point, the unrelieved negativity of the dystopian drive trips over into a perversely utopian gesture, and annihilation becomes the condition of the radically new. I was a postgraduate student in 1994, and I didn’t have either the nerve or the money to hang around specialist record shops to pick up all the latest releases. So I would access Jungle tracks in much the same fitful way that I had followed American comics in the 70s. I would pick them up where and when I could, usually on CD compilations issued long after their dubplate freshness had cooled. For the most part, it was impossible to impose any narrative on Jungle’s relentless flow. Fittingly for a sound that was so depersonalised and dehumanised, the names of the acts tended to be cryptic cyberpunk tags, disconnected from any biography or place. Jungle was best enjoyed as an anonymous electro-libidinal current that seemed to pass through producers, as a series of affects and FX that were de-linked from authors. It sounded like some audio unlife form, a ferocious, feral artificial intelligence that had been unwittingly called up in the studio, the breakbeats like genetically-augmented hounds straining to be free of the leash.  book download  http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=C486849305F06E6EB36B622C89E44962