Politics In Sound; Politics Of Sound

By Tom Kohut

That sound art should have a politics is something which is not immediately obvious. Nor is it a claim that is often made by its practitioners. Of course, it would be too sweeping and implausible a claim to assert that all instances of sound art in all its forms, genres and practices can be grouped under the rubric of a particular set of political strategies; at the same time, it is equally too sweeping and implausible a claim to suggest that there is no political content to the artform whatsoever.[i] Art forms do not render themselves analogous to political strategies at a global level, to be sure, but certain modes of sound art do make claims that are of a political nature, and these should be considered carefully to determine their validity.

The most recent Winnipeg festival of sound send+receive festival v.13 was based around the idea of “Noise and Disruption.” As Artistic Director crys cole wrote:

Noise could be defined as any unwanted sound… a disruption or interference. Within experimental music, unwanted, accidental or problematic sounds are sought after, claimed and manipulated. Rather than fight against the Noise that surrounds us, we capture it, create it and work with it, embracing its confronting nature and using this to challenge the way we listen and the way we experience sound. Whether we choose to order them in a way that helps us relate to the noise differently, or whether we spin them into a disorienting barrage that creates an intoxicating and startling effect on the listener, Noise is a powerful and essential area of exploration. Without Noise, errors and disruptions we would stagnate…[ii]

Noise—whether “Noise”/“The Noise” or merely common-garden “noise”—is credited with several qualities here: it is “unwanted,” it disrupts or interferes, without it we stagnate, etc. These qualities are often asserted to differentiate “noise” from not-noise (defined in terms of inverted values given to musicality, melody and other alleged indications of complacency). The question here is: at what point these qualities become questions of essence​ That is, does Noise have a nature, confronting or otherwise?

Many of the questions asked in the preceding paragraphs are also asked in the anthology of essays Noise & Capitalism.[iii] This 2009 anthology, edited by Basque sound artist Mattin and digital culture e-magazine Mute editor Andrew Iles, contains essays by such people as the seasoned free improv percussionist Eddie Prévost, philosophers Ray Brassier and Nina Powers, new music magazine The Wire contributor Ben Watson among many others, all of whom are involved either as performers or as enthusiasts for Noise music. The anthology formed the basis of a discussion group held during the send + receive v. 13 festival and, arguably, formed the conceptual backdrop for the 2011 festival in general. The linkage of noise and capital is subtle here; it is not a question, as sound and digital artist Joseph Nechvatal, in his 2011 book Immersion Into Noise, claims, that “an art of noise can also be postulated as a realm of anti-social cultural purpose directed toward the revolutionary transformation of an irrational social reality that insists on calling itself rational.”[iv] The implication, as old as the first wave of modernism itself, that disruptive forms and content necessarily have an emancipatory and, by extension, anti-capitalist trajectory is avoided, as is the concomitant opposition between avant-garde noise and predatious capital; the title of the anthology is, after all, Noise AND Capitalism. Is noise necessarily anti-social? Is it any more so than capitalism, the greatest solvent of social relations itself?[v] That noise may, in fact, be not just complicit with capitalism but required by it is not a question that any of the authors in the Noise and Capitalism volume are quite prepared to countenance. I would argue that the reasons why the possible complicity of noise and capitalism can be graphed along two axes: the axis of production/distribution and the axis of non-mediation.

1) Modes of Production/Distribution

Noise musicians, whether they be free improv musicians emerging from the groundbreaking AMM[vi] or post-Throbbing Gristle industrialists,[vii] have, perhaps, made a virtue out of a necessity by insisting on alternate distribution networks for their recorded material. Independent distribution, it is argued, allows artists control over the contexts in which their work may be produced. This reproduces the logic of “Main St. v. Wall St.”, with large music labels crushing the life out of the small, brave independent labels. Less mordantly, one might note that the corrosive effects of macro-capitalism (“Wall Street”) has on the cultural field itself; Eddie Prévost, in his Noise and Capitalism essay “Free Improvisation in Music and Capitalism: Resisting Authority and the Cults of Scientism and Capitalism,” suggests that the technocratic apparatus of capital necessarily co-opts liberatory cultural formations such as free improvisation and valorizes “scientistic” modes such as the Darmstadt serialism of Boulez and Stockhausen or the putatively empty formalism of John Cage and his acolytes.[viii] Mattin, in his concluding essay/manifesto “Anti-Copyright: Why Improvisation and Noise Run Against the Idea of Intellectual Property”, signals an important contradiction here: Prévost runs Matchless Records, which is a fine record label offering authorized recordings of AMM performances. In conversation with Mattin, Prévost notes that this was necessary to prevent larger record labels from profiting off of the artists’ work at the expense of the artists themselves.[ix] Mattin’s focus in this particular avenue of inquiry is the liberation of copyright, so he does not ask the question: what differentiates little capitalisms from large ones? Is it simply that size leads ineluctably to iniquity, or is there something about the capitalist structure of relations that is culturally corrosive?

If “Small is Beautiful” turns out to be politically untenable, another implied proposition is the gift economy in the sense derived from Georges Bataille’s sense of the gift as being conceptually prior to the economic as such, in which nothing circulates freely.[x] Because pre-economic, the implicit argument is that gift economies avoid the potential for recuperation. One such example might be the manner in which Noise & Capitalism is itself distributed. As the publisher’s website notes:

The distribution of this book is going to be done by trading.

If you are an artist, musician, writer or engage in any creative activity, we would very much appreciate that you send a sample of your work as a form of exchange for the book. Otherwise you can write a critical response to the book and send it to Arteleku.

If you are a distributor or a label or a publisher and you want to get copies of the book for distribution, you can send single copies of different books, zines or records in exchange [sic] and Arteleku will send you copies of the book in return.[xi]

In this case, “Even Smaller is Beautiful.” I will admit that there is something deeply attractive about this picture of small interest-related communities interacting with each other on a level playing-field in the exchange of creative forces. Indeed, Mattin suggests that there is a homology between the non-economic transactions proposed above and the affective forces gathered during improvisatory performance: “the radical and exploratory character of improvisation should be directed no only to the making of conditions but in changing the conditions in which the music is produced.”[xii] To further extend the trajectory of this argument: the sense of leaderless creativity of a group subject as culturally instanced in improvisatory collectives, however evanescent, is actualized in the political sphere by the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.

If the equation of a handful of people clutching musical instruments with mass political uprisings seems overly fanciful, it is worth bearing in mind that this sort of the claim about the revolutionary potential of avant-garde music generally and deregulated sound (be it Noise or free improvisation) more specifically is implicit in virtually all of the essays in Noise & Capitalism. But, as I noted earlier, these were precisely the claims of a pure oppositionality between capitalism and noise that have been previously exposed as fallacious; Prévost, a venerable free improviser and theoretician, notes that, at the very least, capitalism forms the background of the scene in which collective improvisation occurs.[xiii] Capitalism mediates the conditions in which sound is produced or consumed. We now arrive at the second axis.

 

2) Non-Mediation

Anthony Iles, in his introduction to this volume, states it quite succinctly:

 

Rather than overcoming mediation, free improvisation and noise are in tension with it – something to which these many attempts to theorize music and its relations to politics attest. The stance of anti-mediation binds the practitioners of these musical interests to a modernist aesthetics in which successive institutional and formal frameworks for making and presenting art are transgressed and transcended. Yet there is also an important split – in the modernist academy this could be interpreted as refining a critique internal to the work, while improvisation and noise arguably turn outwards to the field of social relations.[xiv]

 

There is a caricature of modernism at work here which we can leave aside for the time being.[xv] Before we understand why Noise is anti-mediation (or “in tension with it”), we must first understand what is meant by mediation in this instance. Do the authors who address this question directly mean that mediation is a boundary membrane between sound and perception, which distorts and alters our experience in a manner favourable to capital’s attention economy? (Such is the argument of Howard Slater’s essay “Prisoners of the Earth Come Out! Notes Towards ‘War at the Membrane.’”) This is a particular understanding of mediation as such, which neglects that Noise itself, despite its connotations of primacy and im-mediacy, is nevertheless “media” in the same way that any signifying system is.

This, course, begs the question: are Noise and the sounds produced in the course of free improvisation signifying systems or, as is argued, are they, strictly speaking, a-signifying, which is to say, meaningless? While I want to retain some trace of the pejorative sense of the last word (which can be useful when confronted with the more puerile examples of Noise music), it it also important to maintain a certain relative sense of the term. Ray Brassier, in his polemical essay “Genre is Obsolete,” discusses two sound artists (To Live and Shave in LA and Runzelstirn) and asserts that they “not only mean something different than other experimental musics; they mean differently.”[xvi] The relativity alluded to here is one of competing signifying systems; a work of Noise or free improvisation has separate semiotic protocols than, say, a work of dodecaphonic composition.

However the claims to non-mediation are, I think, more radical than simply asserting a specific criteria for judgement when dealing with Noise and free improvisation. The claim that of non-mediation implies an anti-dialectical stance, insofar as mediation is one of the categories of essence as well and the engine of dialectical thought in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: “[w]hat is unmediated is often held to be superior, the mediated being thought of as dependent”[xvii] Immediacy is allied to experience, and one can see this conceptual logic functioning in Mattin’s consideration of the antimonies of recorded free improvised performances:

It is important to understand that you can never capture a moment, and therefore must never attempt to make a universal truth that represents the moment. It’s only through understanding this disappearance [of the instant in improvised music] that one can bring to lie different qualities that might feel similar but nonetheless raise new perspectives.[xviii]

I must confess that I find the first statement in this passage entirely untenable and demur at the imperatives it presents, e.g. “you can never…”, “must never…”. But questions of tone aside, I would suggest that this appeal to an evanescent moment of experience neglects a fairly important aspect of mediation itself – that im-mediacy is an effect of mediation, not its reversal or overturning: “[i]mmediacy itself is essentially mediated.”[xix] While this desire for immediacy is not universally shared by the essayists in Noise and Capitalism, it does represent a desire to circumvent the culturally corrosive aspects of capitalism sketched above. That this desire is ultimately an impossible desire speaks volumes about the limitations of Noise as a political aesthetic.

 

Tom Kohut holds an M.A. In English from Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) and has written on visual arts, new media and film locally and nationally. He currently lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba and maintains the website The New Ennui (thenewennui@blogspot.com).