Thursday, 22 December 2011
Monday, 19 December 2011
Sean Bonney: Two Letters on Harmony
Letters read by Sean Bonney at the AMM's Xmas Booze Up Innit? 15-xii-2011. All of this has happened already in abandoned buildings.
First Letter on Harmony
Somewhere in London there is a judge who, every seven days, pays a prostitute to re-enact the crimes of those he has sentenced that week, while he looks on and masturbates. Sorry, I've been trying and I just can't get that sentence right. I read about it this morning on Facebook and, you know, it kind of made me want to puke into my cornflakes. Its annoying, I was hoping to make some progress on the thoughts I’ve been developing on the Pythagorean system of harmonics, and how it relies on a consciously fictional central point in order to keep its symmetrical force stable. There’s a passage on it in Lenin’s Collected Works (Vol 38), and I think it might be helpful, tho for what I’m not quite sure. But anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about this judge. And then I started thinking, well, what if - and sure its a pretty big if - but what if he was producing these emissions quite deliberately, as the source of a central vibration through which the judiciary could impose a new and extremely rigid analysis of the city, within which a sterile atmosphere could be maintained for the propagation of a limited number of official sentences (say, for example, seven) from which all possible thought could be derived. Sex magic, yeh. All of that ludicrous shit. Don’t think I’m turning into one of those wankers in David Icke masks: in terms of creation myths its a fairly traditional narrative structure. What this judge probably doesn’t realise, however, is that each of his particle jets will necessarily invoke an adjunct sentence, which while in its weak form may only be manifest in certain cries of disbelief and fear, in extreme conditions may - and that's a very big “may” - may ultimately manifest as a ring of antiprotons, otherwise known as attack dogs. Hackney, for example. These attack dogs are stable, but they are typically short-lived since any collision with an official sentence will cause both of them to be annihilated in a brief but highly intense burst of energy. In other words: buy a gun, learn to shoot it, get a rudimentary job in the high court, and then do some very simple equations. Hope you’re well, by the way. The sky over London is milky and foul.
Second Letter on Harmony
OK lets try again. Though bear in mind, this is gonna be naive as all hell. I mean, I haven’t done the requisite study, of what harmony is and what it has been etc. What I can gather, from a careful reading of some of Lenin’s Notes on Hegel - he’s got something in there about the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres proposing a perfect cosmology, a hierarchy built on scalar realities that justifies social conditions on earth, where everybody is in their place, and nobody is able to question the beauty and perfection of these relationships. Straightforward. And for it to work, for all these justifications to hold true, a fictional body is essential: the antichthon, or counter-earth. Thus, at the limit, the gravitational pull that holds the entire system of hierarchical harmony together is an untruth, but an untruth with the power to kill. But if this untruth is the site of justification and corporate (ie ritual) slaughter it’s also the site, magnetic as all hell, of contention and repulsion, which can transgress its own limits until something quite different, namely, crime, or impossibility, appears. For Ernst Bloch, the revolution was the crossroads where the dead come to meet. For Lorca, music was the scream of dead generations - the language of the dead. But our system of harmony knows so well it contains its own negation that it has mummified it, and while we know we live within a criminal harmony, we also know we are held helplessly within it as fixed subjects, or rather as objects, even cadavers, of an alien music. But never mind, just as protest is useless only because it stays within the limits of the already known, so the hidden harmony is better than the obvious. Heraclitus. Music as a slicing through of harmonic hierarchies etc, poetic realities as counter-earths where we can propose a new stance in which we can see and act on what had previously been kept invisible etc. Ourselves, for one thing. That sounds just great, absolutely tip fucking top, until you remember that, equally, the harmony of the money fetish is that of the commodity fetish now become visible and dazzling to our eyes, ie we don’t have any kind of monopoly on harmonic invisibility, and all of those occultist systems that some of us still love so much have always been bourgeois through and through. That is, its not a question of gentrification, but that the whole process has always started from the invisible spot where your feet are, tapping whatever fetishised rhythms right into the star encrusted ground. That famous green door with its sign “no admittance except on business”. That is, however much we may claim that it is not protest, but a fast alteration in the structural scansion at the city’s core, the hidden contours of our songs are still a nasty little rich kid fluttering his hecatombic chromosomes all over our collective history. Shit. Its why I still hate Mojo magazine. OK. Now lets get really obvious. Once, revolutions took their poetry from the past, now they have to get it from the future. We all know that. Famous and so on. In its contemporary form, the slogan Greek anarchists were using a couple of winters ago: we are smashing up the present because we come from the future. I love that, but really, it’s all just so much mysticism: but if we can turn it inside out, on its head etc we’ll find this, for example: “the repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed its insistence past music. It was hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair . . . . That stance spread like fire thru the cabarets and the joints of the black cities, so that the sound itself became a basis for thought, and the innovators searched for uglier modes”. That's Amiri Baraka, a short story called “The Screamers” from 1965 or something like that. That is, metallic, musical screeches as systems of thought pushing away from, and through, the imposed limits of the conventional harmonic or social systems, thus clearing some ground from where we can offer counter-proposals. Slogans. The battle-cries of the dead. Tho, obviously, Pizza Express and the Poetry Cafe have done as much as is in their power to neutralise any truth content that might be lurking within that possibility. On September 30th 1965, Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Donald Rafael Garrett, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones and John Coltrane recorded the album Live in Seattle: it is, according to someone quoted on Wikipedia, “not for those who prefer jazz as melodic background music”. Its one of those examples of recorded music that still sounds absolutely present years after the fact, because it was one of the sonic receptacles of a revolutionary moment that was never realised: that is, it has become a Benjaminian monad, a cluster of still unused energies that still retain the chance of exploding into the present. Play it loud in the Walthamstow shopping mall and you’ll see what I mean. Yeh yeh yeh. I’m thinking about a specific moment on the album, around thirteen minutes into “Evolution”, when someone - I don’t think its actually Coltrane - blows something through a horn that forces a dimensional time-loop through the already seismic constellations set up within the music’s harmonic system, becoming a force that moves beyond any musical utterance, while still containing direct, clear communication at its centre: ie fire and death on your uptight ass. Among many other things, obviously. I guess Seattle, like anywhere else, is sealed up in its gentrification by now. But anyway, that horn sounds like a metal bone, a place where the dead and future generations meet up and are all on blue, electric fire. CLR James once said that “the violent conflicts of our age enable our practised vision to see into the very bones of previous revolutions more easily than before”. Go figure. Due to its position in the Pacific Ring of Fire, Seattle is in a major earthquake zone. On November 30th 1999 Seattle WTO protests included direct and rational attacks on, among other things, the Bank of America, Banana Republic, the Gap, Washington Mutual Bank, Starbucks, Planet Hollywood etc etc etc. “Cosmos”. “Out of this World”. “Body and Soul”, you get what I mean. Two years later, in Genoa, the anarchist Carlo Giuliani got a police bullet in the centre of his face. Remember that name. Capital’s untruth, its site of corporate slaughter - ie ritual slaughter - the silent frequency at the centre of its oh so gentle melodies. Ah, I can’t see to finish this, I’ve had a lot of valium today. But anyway, to put it simply, the purpose of song is not only to raise the living standards of the working class, but to prevent the ruling class from living in the way that they have been. The violent conflicts of our age make it impossible to recollect musical emotions in tranquility, unless it is the kind of tranquility that makes clear the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence. A high metallic wire etc. The counter-earth rigged to such sonic stroboscopics that we, however temporarily, become the irruption into present time of the screams of the bones of history, tearing into the mind of the listener, unambiguously determining a new stance toward reality, a new ground outside of official harmony, from which to act. Or put it another way, next time some jazz fan tells you that late Coltrane is unlistenable, or something, punch em in the face. Seven times. More later.
First Letter on Harmony
Second Letter on Harmony
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
Ian Birchall & Ben Watson: Balls Shot Off
Ian Birchall reviewed Ben Watson's Adorno for Revolutionaries in 'It's The Song I Hate', for Review31.co.uk.
Ben Watson replied in the article 'The Quivering Pschophysique'
Now, read on....
Dear Ben,
Many thanks for taking the trouble to respond so extensively and so vigorously to my brief review of your book. I thoroughly approve of sharp polemic and ad hominem argument, and on my day I can be quite good at them myself. I chose to write what I thought was a sympathetic review, with some reservations, because I actually liked quite a lot of the book, and wanted to encourage others to read it. But apparently nothing other than total adoration will do. I think it is you who believes that “changing the wall-hangings… is unforgiveable”. If I were to say, for example, that I find Samuel Beckett’s novels (not his plays) tedious and unreadable, I should be greeted with banshee-like howls of rage that would make Matthew Arnold in distress sound like Matt Monro.
I am accused of following Lukács in believing that “Sir Walter Scott is the apogee of modern literature”. In fact I have only read one novel by Scott in my life, and I have published various articles sharply critical of Lukács’s literary views, notably his total misunderstanding of Zola. But never mind facts or what I actually wrote – it’s much more fun denouncing what you would like to imagine I wrote.
In fact, the reference to Lukács you take exception to was a mild joke. Since your rage seems to have made you humourless, let me explain it to you. Lukács developed the idea of “imputed” class consciousness. For a Marxist this is an absolutely essential idea – unless we have reason to think that the working class has the potential to act in a quite different way to what it is actually doing at present, then the whole of Marxism collapses. But it also has dangers, primarily encouraging the belief that the party knows better than the class. I was suggesting that at times you were guilty of something rather similar – of thinking you know better than Adorno himself what Adorno really thought.
Nor am I against “speculation” – the phrase “provocative speculation” was actually a compliment, but you were too stupid to recognise it. Of course it is quite legitimate to measure a dead writer’s ideas against subsequent reality. Would Karl Marx have thought that Russia was a workers’ state? Highly unlikely.
But except where such arguments can be demonstrated by fairly rigorous textual references, they are, quite literally, speculation. Would Spinoza have liked Dusty Springfield? And I think such arguments betray some sort of nostalgia for the immortality of the soul. Adorno, like the rest of us, was a finite being who lived at a particular determinate time. To try to use some sort of disembodied, eternal Adorno to validate punk (why should it need such validation?) verges on mysticism.
You refer to me as “professor of French Studies”. This is inaccurate - I have never held a professorship, and I have not held any academic post whatsoever for the last eighteen years. Moreover, were I prepared to indulge in unbridled ad hominem attacks, I could point out that it is particularly bizarre and offensive for you, of all people, to use the word “professor” as a term of abuse. But I have sufficient good taste and respect for people who, despite everything, I think of as comrades, to pursue that.
Instead I’ll try and develop briefly my final points which were made in abbreviated form because of the word limit I was working to.
You reiterate that “all living humans unbullied by vicars and academics are capable of erotically-charged relations to anyone and anything”. Tell that to some poor sod who’s had his balls shot off in Afghanistan. In your novel Shitkicks & Doughballs you imply that people you dislike (Simon Frith, Alex Callinicos) are sexless and impotent. I happen to think this is profoundly offensive to people who, through no fault of their own, are impotent, or who are asexual by choice. [The point would have been obvious if you had made them gay – but you wouldn’t have dared.] Somehow they are inferior to Ben who is banging away non-stop. For thinking that I am accused of both “postmodern doxa” and having my ideas formed by Sheila McGregor. That those two propositions might be contradictory does not seem to have crossed your mind.
Then you assert “there isn't a mention of Saussure in the book”. You really should stop trusting your index and read what you yourself have written. Page 17, footnote: “It is not with Ferdinand de Saussure but with Bishop Berkeley….. that the description of language as ‘a great number of arbitrary signs’ begins”. As far as I am concerned Saussure is like Newton or Darwin – his work can be modified, revised and built upon, but you can’t go back to what existed before. Can we really abandon the concept of the “phoneme”? And to reject the idea of the “arbitrary sign” is to lapse into the unconscious racism of the monoglot. If the word “dog” somehow has a non-arbitrary connection with the doggishness of real dogs, then “dog” must be its real name, and all those foreign idiots who call it a “chien”, hund”, “perro” or “kalb” are by definition inferior. You could sell that one to Nigel Farage.
You may put this on your website if you please. If you don’t please, you may wipe your arse on it. I reserve the right to circulate it to anyone interested.
And since the things we agree on are far more important than either Adorno or Beckett, I will conclude with comradely greetings and best wishes,
Ian Birchall, London, 12-xii-2011
Reply by Ben Watson
Ah, you’ve come back for more. I like that, Ian.
Although people who think cultural activity is all about mutual appreciation and networking (i.e. careerism) accuse me of being ad hominem and insulting, it’s really the truth of the matter I’m after. All the polite lies and evasions and silences make us dull. I believe vast swathes of contemporary boredom would be abolished if people dared say in public what they mutter to their spouses in private. If it makes people flare up, well and good. As all punks know, dry tinder just begs for the spark.
Samuel Beckett? I’m not sure he’s quite the monument he’s been made into, actually. More pertinent would be to contrast the works of Stewart Home (whom I know you detest) to your own novels. By breaking through certain correctnesses and inhibitions that keep your novels bland and patronising, Home manages to write books which convey some of the excitement and panic of revolutionary politics. This is possible because he breaks with the notion of novelistic realism you adhere to. You might disagree with Lukács about Walter Scott, but in his debates with Brecht and Adorno, you take his side, and refuse to see the breakdown of bourgeois novelistic realism as anything but decadence. Us Joyceans think otherwise. For the AMM, socialist politics which adopts the Lukácsian aesthetic has a topdown, bourgeois perspective: culture as personal property rather than a puzzle only democratic discussion and materialist analysis can resolve.
There’s something so obtuse and English about your statements, Ian. They remind me of Dr Johnson. Someone defined a horse to Dr Johnson as a “herbivore quadruped”. Johnson shot back: “What if the horse was missing a leg?” Likewise, you refute my statement that “all living humans unbullied by vicars and academics are capable of erotically-charged relations to anyone and anything” by saying: “Tell that to some poor sod who’s had his balls shot off in Afghanistan”. This sounds like a new movement in identity politics, you’d better copyright it quick: castrati denouncing all references to sex as personal insults! In fact, the existential project of paring down the human to its “essence” — devoid of language, culture, cuisine, physique, sex, eyes, taste, external limbs — is the comedy of Samuel Beckett, and when taken seriously ends you up with Gilles Deleuze and his “body without organs”. You say I’m wrong to equate orthodox postmodernist moralism with Sheila McGregor, but I see them both as woeful products of feminism’s insufficient critique: since it exploits sexuality, the bourgeoisie can only see those who aren’t ashamed of it as wicked, dirty and sexist.
Aha, so the accusation about being “profoundly reactionary” on sexuality comes from your reading my novel Shitkicks & Doughballs (you are very committed to the idea that a reviewer should review the person - i.e. the whole oeuvre - rather than the book in hand, aren’t you?). You say I didn’t “dare” make my characters gay. Well, it turns out Semen Froth’s “Trish” is in fact a boy, and Stewpot Hauser ends up buggering Out To Lunch (Lunch reflects: “This was like a Wyndham Lewis novel where the homo sex actually happens!”) although, in the event of writing, buggery was beyond my powers of fantasy, and I had to fold in a description from Larry Townsend’s classic The Leatherman’s Handbook.
You were right, I missed the fact that Saussure got mentioned in the book. I didn’t index “passing” references. In reply to what you say, I’ll simply cite the passage in question: “It was via structuralist semiotics that the idealist notion of significance as a transcendental, sealed-off, quasi-divine system was most recently smuggled back into desanctified philosophy and the secular humanities. Interestingly, it is not with Ferdinand de Saussure but with Bishop Berkeley, scourge of materialism and defender of Christianity, that the description of language as ‘a great number of arbitrary signs’ begins1, though of course Berkeley’s idealism, like everyone else’s, is fundamentally a restatement of Pauline neo-Platonism.” That’s my thesis. Utterly out of kilter with current academic assumptions and fashions, but that’s where the AMM thinks Marxists should be.
You tastefully don’t “out” me by saying that Esther Leslie, my partner and the mother of our children, is herself a professor. Well, she is: Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at Birkbeck, a title she chose herself, and which derives from the collection of Marxist debates about culture (Verso, 1977) whose matrix of discussion and polemic I recommend in Adorno for Revolutionaries over taking a line from either Adorno or Lukács.2 But the day Esther comes home and declares herself as a structuralist—Saussure’s linguistics as epochal as gravity or evolution—is the day we divorce. My digs against you being a “professor” are not to do with your day job, but to try and explain why your Marxism is so pragmatically political and unimaginative—so unMarxist. You’ve swallowed all that stuff you had to teach, Ian. Go and read Valentin Volosinov. He spells out precisely why a Marxist cannot agree with Saussure, much less credit him with a scientific leap forward. And to accuse someone who disagrees with structuralist linguistics of being racist; this is like the Com Dem government condemning “locals” who might object to new capitalist developments of “opposing progress”. Certainly, bringing to consciousness the actuality of the words in our mouths (“poetics”, something which makes you reach for your revolver) means becoming aware of our specific geographical location and tribal ancestors and all kinds of material facts an idealist (or Stalinist) Marxism would rather suppress (in favour of some global “class struggle” fought in the share-price pages of the Financial Times rather than by real people). But then this is the relevance of Finnegans Wake, which tried to imagine “dog” in every tongue and what that would mean to someone in touch with every language. Which is where, due to the huge movements of people brought about by capitalist insecurity, we actually are in London and all major urban centres. In fact, your equation of Saussurian linguistics with globalisation suggests many avenues for fruitful critique. Thanks!
You conclude by saying: “And since the things we agree on are far more important than either Adorno or Beckett, I will conclude with comradely greetings and best wishes”. I’m grateful for comradely greetings and best wishes, of course, but I cannot concur that this discussion is trivial and should be buried in the “deeper interests of the struggle” or whatever. This debate IS part of the struggle as far as I am concerned, and if there was somewhere else I could go to argue my Marxism, I’d go there and drop this. The AMM was formed by ex-SWP activists precisely because we think the argument about Lukács was wrongly postponed, and that the denigration of modernism and art extremism in the party (“inaccessible”, “elitist” etc) conceals blatantly bourgeois political aspirations and methods. Marxism has no truck with public opinion—neither in what we say about Obama, nor in what we say about an art exhibition or a pop hit. We believe the cosy “club” mentality of yore goes nowhere, does nothing and gratifies no-one but a few worn-out comrades with standing orders to party funds, and is completely irrelevant to the times we are living in. We don’t believe money can sustain, much less build, a revolutionary party, and we agree with those calling for a complete restructuring of SWP democracy. It’s the only way to make the party active again. We believe that the flames of honest expression about “subjective” issues which Adorno stood for CAN fuse with a public politics, and when it does the results will be explosive. These are the stakes of the debate.
Ben Watson, Camden, 13-xii-2011
--
1. George Berkeley, ‘The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained’, London: 1733, #40; Philosophical Works, Including the Works on Vision, ed. M.R. Ayers, Melbourne and London: Dent, 1975, p. 241.
2. Ben Watson, Adorno for Revolutionaries, London: Unkant, 2011, p. 154.
Ben Watson replied in the article 'The Quivering Pschophysique'
Now, read on....
 |
| Jan Svankmajer: Karl Marx as a collection of butterflies |
Many thanks for taking the trouble to respond so extensively and so vigorously to my brief review of your book. I thoroughly approve of sharp polemic and ad hominem argument, and on my day I can be quite good at them myself. I chose to write what I thought was a sympathetic review, with some reservations, because I actually liked quite a lot of the book, and wanted to encourage others to read it. But apparently nothing other than total adoration will do. I think it is you who believes that “changing the wall-hangings… is unforgiveable”. If I were to say, for example, that I find Samuel Beckett’s novels (not his plays) tedious and unreadable, I should be greeted with banshee-like howls of rage that would make Matthew Arnold in distress sound like Matt Monro.
I am accused of following Lukács in believing that “Sir Walter Scott is the apogee of modern literature”. In fact I have only read one novel by Scott in my life, and I have published various articles sharply critical of Lukács’s literary views, notably his total misunderstanding of Zola. But never mind facts or what I actually wrote – it’s much more fun denouncing what you would like to imagine I wrote.
In fact, the reference to Lukács you take exception to was a mild joke. Since your rage seems to have made you humourless, let me explain it to you. Lukács developed the idea of “imputed” class consciousness. For a Marxist this is an absolutely essential idea – unless we have reason to think that the working class has the potential to act in a quite different way to what it is actually doing at present, then the whole of Marxism collapses. But it also has dangers, primarily encouraging the belief that the party knows better than the class. I was suggesting that at times you were guilty of something rather similar – of thinking you know better than Adorno himself what Adorno really thought.
Nor am I against “speculation” – the phrase “provocative speculation” was actually a compliment, but you were too stupid to recognise it. Of course it is quite legitimate to measure a dead writer’s ideas against subsequent reality. Would Karl Marx have thought that Russia was a workers’ state? Highly unlikely.
But except where such arguments can be demonstrated by fairly rigorous textual references, they are, quite literally, speculation. Would Spinoza have liked Dusty Springfield? And I think such arguments betray some sort of nostalgia for the immortality of the soul. Adorno, like the rest of us, was a finite being who lived at a particular determinate time. To try to use some sort of disembodied, eternal Adorno to validate punk (why should it need such validation?) verges on mysticism.
You refer to me as “professor of French Studies”. This is inaccurate - I have never held a professorship, and I have not held any academic post whatsoever for the last eighteen years. Moreover, were I prepared to indulge in unbridled ad hominem attacks, I could point out that it is particularly bizarre and offensive for you, of all people, to use the word “professor” as a term of abuse. But I have sufficient good taste and respect for people who, despite everything, I think of as comrades, to pursue that.
Instead I’ll try and develop briefly my final points which were made in abbreviated form because of the word limit I was working to.
You reiterate that “all living humans unbullied by vicars and academics are capable of erotically-charged relations to anyone and anything”. Tell that to some poor sod who’s had his balls shot off in Afghanistan. In your novel Shitkicks & Doughballs you imply that people you dislike (Simon Frith, Alex Callinicos) are sexless and impotent. I happen to think this is profoundly offensive to people who, through no fault of their own, are impotent, or who are asexual by choice. [The point would have been obvious if you had made them gay – but you wouldn’t have dared.] Somehow they are inferior to Ben who is banging away non-stop. For thinking that I am accused of both “postmodern doxa” and having my ideas formed by Sheila McGregor. That those two propositions might be contradictory does not seem to have crossed your mind.
Then you assert “there isn't a mention of Saussure in the book”. You really should stop trusting your index and read what you yourself have written. Page 17, footnote: “It is not with Ferdinand de Saussure but with Bishop Berkeley….. that the description of language as ‘a great number of arbitrary signs’ begins”. As far as I am concerned Saussure is like Newton or Darwin – his work can be modified, revised and built upon, but you can’t go back to what existed before. Can we really abandon the concept of the “phoneme”? And to reject the idea of the “arbitrary sign” is to lapse into the unconscious racism of the monoglot. If the word “dog” somehow has a non-arbitrary connection with the doggishness of real dogs, then “dog” must be its real name, and all those foreign idiots who call it a “chien”, hund”, “perro” or “kalb” are by definition inferior. You could sell that one to Nigel Farage.
You may put this on your website if you please. If you don’t please, you may wipe your arse on it. I reserve the right to circulate it to anyone interested.
And since the things we agree on are far more important than either Adorno or Beckett, I will conclude with comradely greetings and best wishes,
Ian Birchall, London, 12-xii-2011
Reply by Ben Watson
Although people who think cultural activity is all about mutual appreciation and networking (i.e. careerism) accuse me of being ad hominem and insulting, it’s really the truth of the matter I’m after. All the polite lies and evasions and silences make us dull. I believe vast swathes of contemporary boredom would be abolished if people dared say in public what they mutter to their spouses in private. If it makes people flare up, well and good. As all punks know, dry tinder just begs for the spark.
Samuel Beckett? I’m not sure he’s quite the monument he’s been made into, actually. More pertinent would be to contrast the works of Stewart Home (whom I know you detest) to your own novels. By breaking through certain correctnesses and inhibitions that keep your novels bland and patronising, Home manages to write books which convey some of the excitement and panic of revolutionary politics. This is possible because he breaks with the notion of novelistic realism you adhere to. You might disagree with Lukács about Walter Scott, but in his debates with Brecht and Adorno, you take his side, and refuse to see the breakdown of bourgeois novelistic realism as anything but decadence. Us Joyceans think otherwise. For the AMM, socialist politics which adopts the Lukácsian aesthetic has a topdown, bourgeois perspective: culture as personal property rather than a puzzle only democratic discussion and materialist analysis can resolve.
There’s something so obtuse and English about your statements, Ian. They remind me of Dr Johnson. Someone defined a horse to Dr Johnson as a “herbivore quadruped”. Johnson shot back: “What if the horse was missing a leg?” Likewise, you refute my statement that “all living humans unbullied by vicars and academics are capable of erotically-charged relations to anyone and anything” by saying: “Tell that to some poor sod who’s had his balls shot off in Afghanistan”. This sounds like a new movement in identity politics, you’d better copyright it quick: castrati denouncing all references to sex as personal insults! In fact, the existential project of paring down the human to its “essence” — devoid of language, culture, cuisine, physique, sex, eyes, taste, external limbs — is the comedy of Samuel Beckett, and when taken seriously ends you up with Gilles Deleuze and his “body without organs”. You say I’m wrong to equate orthodox postmodernist moralism with Sheila McGregor, but I see them both as woeful products of feminism’s insufficient critique: since it exploits sexuality, the bourgeoisie can only see those who aren’t ashamed of it as wicked, dirty and sexist.
Aha, so the accusation about being “profoundly reactionary” on sexuality comes from your reading my novel Shitkicks & Doughballs (you are very committed to the idea that a reviewer should review the person - i.e. the whole oeuvre - rather than the book in hand, aren’t you?). You say I didn’t “dare” make my characters gay. Well, it turns out Semen Froth’s “Trish” is in fact a boy, and Stewpot Hauser ends up buggering Out To Lunch (Lunch reflects: “This was like a Wyndham Lewis novel where the homo sex actually happens!”) although, in the event of writing, buggery was beyond my powers of fantasy, and I had to fold in a description from Larry Townsend’s classic The Leatherman’s Handbook.
You were right, I missed the fact that Saussure got mentioned in the book. I didn’t index “passing” references. In reply to what you say, I’ll simply cite the passage in question: “It was via structuralist semiotics that the idealist notion of significance as a transcendental, sealed-off, quasi-divine system was most recently smuggled back into desanctified philosophy and the secular humanities. Interestingly, it is not with Ferdinand de Saussure but with Bishop Berkeley, scourge of materialism and defender of Christianity, that the description of language as ‘a great number of arbitrary signs’ begins1, though of course Berkeley’s idealism, like everyone else’s, is fundamentally a restatement of Pauline neo-Platonism.” That’s my thesis. Utterly out of kilter with current academic assumptions and fashions, but that’s where the AMM thinks Marxists should be.
You tastefully don’t “out” me by saying that Esther Leslie, my partner and the mother of our children, is herself a professor. Well, she is: Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at Birkbeck, a title she chose herself, and which derives from the collection of Marxist debates about culture (Verso, 1977) whose matrix of discussion and polemic I recommend in Adorno for Revolutionaries over taking a line from either Adorno or Lukács.2 But the day Esther comes home and declares herself as a structuralist—Saussure’s linguistics as epochal as gravity or evolution—is the day we divorce. My digs against you being a “professor” are not to do with your day job, but to try and explain why your Marxism is so pragmatically political and unimaginative—so unMarxist. You’ve swallowed all that stuff you had to teach, Ian. Go and read Valentin Volosinov. He spells out precisely why a Marxist cannot agree with Saussure, much less credit him with a scientific leap forward. And to accuse someone who disagrees with structuralist linguistics of being racist; this is like the Com Dem government condemning “locals” who might object to new capitalist developments of “opposing progress”. Certainly, bringing to consciousness the actuality of the words in our mouths (“poetics”, something which makes you reach for your revolver) means becoming aware of our specific geographical location and tribal ancestors and all kinds of material facts an idealist (or Stalinist) Marxism would rather suppress (in favour of some global “class struggle” fought in the share-price pages of the Financial Times rather than by real people). But then this is the relevance of Finnegans Wake, which tried to imagine “dog” in every tongue and what that would mean to someone in touch with every language. Which is where, due to the huge movements of people brought about by capitalist insecurity, we actually are in London and all major urban centres. In fact, your equation of Saussurian linguistics with globalisation suggests many avenues for fruitful critique. Thanks!
You conclude by saying: “And since the things we agree on are far more important than either Adorno or Beckett, I will conclude with comradely greetings and best wishes”. I’m grateful for comradely greetings and best wishes, of course, but I cannot concur that this discussion is trivial and should be buried in the “deeper interests of the struggle” or whatever. This debate IS part of the struggle as far as I am concerned, and if there was somewhere else I could go to argue my Marxism, I’d go there and drop this. The AMM was formed by ex-SWP activists precisely because we think the argument about Lukács was wrongly postponed, and that the denigration of modernism and art extremism in the party (“inaccessible”, “elitist” etc) conceals blatantly bourgeois political aspirations and methods. Marxism has no truck with public opinion—neither in what we say about Obama, nor in what we say about an art exhibition or a pop hit. We believe the cosy “club” mentality of yore goes nowhere, does nothing and gratifies no-one but a few worn-out comrades with standing orders to party funds, and is completely irrelevant to the times we are living in. We don’t believe money can sustain, much less build, a revolutionary party, and we agree with those calling for a complete restructuring of SWP democracy. It’s the only way to make the party active again. We believe that the flames of honest expression about “subjective” issues which Adorno stood for CAN fuse with a public politics, and when it does the results will be explosive. These are the stakes of the debate.
Ben Watson, Camden, 13-xii-2011
--
1. George Berkeley, ‘The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained’, London: 1733, #40; Philosophical Works, Including the Works on Vision, ed. M.R. Ayers, Melbourne and London: Dent, 1975, p. 241.
2. Ben Watson, Adorno for Revolutionaries, London: Unkant, 2011, p. 154.
Monday, 12 December 2011
Ben Watson: The Quivering Pschophysique: A Reply to Ian Birchall
Ben Watson replies to Ian Birchall's review of Adorno for Revolutionaries, It's The Song I Hate, on Review31.co.uk
Political parties are clubs, and everyone likes to feel at home in their club. However, when Marx founded the International Workingmen's Association he proposed something rather different from the Carlton Club, or even a Workingman's Club. With his concept of the proletariat, Marx had arrived at a political constituency without a home: its internationalism was predicated on its lack of property, its lack of a stake in the bourgeois national state. So the classic statements of Marxism have never been about making people feel at home, or catering to their comfort, or their expectations, or their prejudices. Indeed, quite the opposite. Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme and Lenin's April Theses were slaps in the face to their readers.
So I must say I was rather surprised to read Ian Birchall's review of Adorno for Revolutionaries, because its strongest suit is to say the book is querulous, weird and unusual, and therefore not to be taken seriously. In his preface to the second edition of Capital, Marx remarked that, in Germany, Political Economy was still an "outlandish science" ("audländische Wissenschaft"), but he didn't thereby imply it should be ignored. Birchall appears to be in a club where everyone is already agreed as to who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, and if you read something you think is exciting or insightful by the wrong guy, well then, you are out of the club. Everything worth knowing has all been decided long ago and you're a wrecker and a splitter for trying to stir things up all over again. The problem is, a club where everyone is asleep under their newspapers is not a very exciting prospect for newcomers.
Back in 1963, Adorno criticized the idea that "products of the mind can in esence be elucidated by appeal to the will and intention of their creator" (AfR, p. 48), comparing it to the plaster busts of great thinkers which used to grace middle-class parlours. Another comparison—proving how petty-bourgeois was the Stalinist concept of Marxism—could be the banners showing overlapping profiles of 'great socialist thinkers' which draped Moscow's Red Square as nuclear missiles were wheeled by on May Day. Perhaps Birchall is not so far from this concept as he should be. Lukacs's profile has replaced that of Stalin, but if you care to disagree with Lukacs's idea that Sir Walter Scottt is the apogee of modern literature, then you are suggesting changing the wall-hangings, which is unforgiveable. This is in fact simply old-fashioned philistinism, as lazy as it is collusive with others' laziness: not facing the specifics of an argument, but disagreeing by reference to some readymade league table of authorities.
Birchall excoriates me for talking positively about Brecht, because he failed to come to Trotsky's defence at the time of the Show Trials. Birchall—whose history-writing is apparently not 'shaky' like mine—appears to be mixing up various 'avant garde versus realism' debates at Marxism with what's actually in Adorno for Revolutionaries. Brecht is mentioned three times. Twice he's in a list of his Marxist contemporaries whose collective debates about art and society are recommended over and above taking a 'line' from Adorno (or Lukacs!)—and the last reference is to Kuhle Wampe, recommending Brecht's film for its realistic treatment of sexual relations amongst the young.1
I'm also excoriated for proposing that Adornoism be applied to music that postdates him (I suppose we're meant to merely repeat what Adorno said about Mahler and Schoenberg: the kind of pointless recycling that characterises sleevenotes for Deutsche Grammophon releases). The 'historian' in Birchall rebels against such "provocative speculation". No doubt anyone writing a 'Marxist' analysis of the War on Terror—instead of, say, Chartism—is also guilty of "provocative speculation". If so, such provocative speculation is just what we need right now.
Birchall concludes with a paragraph that show how the professor of French Studies has won out over the revolutionary in his ideological make-up. Apparently my notion of "'natural' (normal, youthful) sexuality" is profoundly reactionary. Because I don't obey the postmodern doxa that only 'deviant' or 'subversive' sexualities are worth celebrating—because I'm a Marxist and a Freudian and think all living humans unbullied by vicars and academics are capable of erotically-charged relations to anyone and anything—I'm not just 'reactionary', but 'profoundly' so. This is someone whose line on sexuality was established by Sheila MacGregor some thirty years ago—adopting the worst moralism and reality-evasion of the Women's Movement—and hasn't had a thoughtful time with a free hand and a fresh erotic idea since.
In his last comments, Birchall the Unshakeable appears very shaky indeed. Here he's run out of 'Marxist' arguments completely, and resorts to the oldest trick in the academic lexicon: Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of signs. No matter that there isn't a mention of Saussure in the book (Birchall must be recalling an old enthusiasm of mine for Valentin Volosinov, who laid the groundwork for a Marxist and revolutionary semiotics), Birchall can tell me with authority—being a Professor of French Studies—that I haven't "understood Saussure's theory of language". Well, that's for a very good reason: as a Marxist, I completely disagree with Saussure's blatant idealism (an idealism which underlies all the Parisian exports, from Althusser through to Badiou and Rancière). Prefering Wittgenstein to Freud, Birchall plumps for authorised abstractions versus analysis of the quivering pschophysique: that's well and good for the political-party neuroses of the repressed, mais ce n'est pas Marxisme, mon ami.
Ben Watson, Camden, 12-x11-2011
Ian's original review can be read here >>
--
1. Editor: He's quoted favourably by Andy Wilson in the Preface too, Ben. And since that quote is about production/poesis versus bureaucratic fiat, we'll mention it again here: "Benjamin says that, when he mentioned ‘Lukács, Gábot and Kurella… [and] people like this’, Brecht commented; ‘They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable. You never know where you are with production; production is the unforseeable. You never know what’s going to come out. And they themselves don’t want to produce. They want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat’. Walter Benjamin, ‘Conversations With Brecht’, tr. Anya Bostock, in Adorno, et al., Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso Books, 2007, p. 97." - TGE
So I must say I was rather surprised to read Ian Birchall's review of Adorno for Revolutionaries, because its strongest suit is to say the book is querulous, weird and unusual, and therefore not to be taken seriously. In his preface to the second edition of Capital, Marx remarked that, in Germany, Political Economy was still an "outlandish science" ("audländische Wissenschaft"), but he didn't thereby imply it should be ignored. Birchall appears to be in a club where everyone is already agreed as to who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, and if you read something you think is exciting or insightful by the wrong guy, well then, you are out of the club. Everything worth knowing has all been decided long ago and you're a wrecker and a splitter for trying to stir things up all over again. The problem is, a club where everyone is asleep under their newspapers is not a very exciting prospect for newcomers.
Back in 1963, Adorno criticized the idea that "products of the mind can in esence be elucidated by appeal to the will and intention of their creator" (AfR, p. 48), comparing it to the plaster busts of great thinkers which used to grace middle-class parlours. Another comparison—proving how petty-bourgeois was the Stalinist concept of Marxism—could be the banners showing overlapping profiles of 'great socialist thinkers' which draped Moscow's Red Square as nuclear missiles were wheeled by on May Day. Perhaps Birchall is not so far from this concept as he should be. Lukacs's profile has replaced that of Stalin, but if you care to disagree with Lukacs's idea that Sir Walter Scottt is the apogee of modern literature, then you are suggesting changing the wall-hangings, which is unforgiveable. This is in fact simply old-fashioned philistinism, as lazy as it is collusive with others' laziness: not facing the specifics of an argument, but disagreeing by reference to some readymade league table of authorities.
Birchall excoriates me for talking positively about Brecht, because he failed to come to Trotsky's defence at the time of the Show Trials. Birchall—whose history-writing is apparently not 'shaky' like mine—appears to be mixing up various 'avant garde versus realism' debates at Marxism with what's actually in Adorno for Revolutionaries. Brecht is mentioned three times. Twice he's in a list of his Marxist contemporaries whose collective debates about art and society are recommended over and above taking a 'line' from Adorno (or Lukacs!)—and the last reference is to Kuhle Wampe, recommending Brecht's film for its realistic treatment of sexual relations amongst the young.1
I'm also excoriated for proposing that Adornoism be applied to music that postdates him (I suppose we're meant to merely repeat what Adorno said about Mahler and Schoenberg: the kind of pointless recycling that characterises sleevenotes for Deutsche Grammophon releases). The 'historian' in Birchall rebels against such "provocative speculation". No doubt anyone writing a 'Marxist' analysis of the War on Terror—instead of, say, Chartism—is also guilty of "provocative speculation". If so, such provocative speculation is just what we need right now.
Birchall concludes with a paragraph that show how the professor of French Studies has won out over the revolutionary in his ideological make-up. Apparently my notion of "'natural' (normal, youthful) sexuality" is profoundly reactionary. Because I don't obey the postmodern doxa that only 'deviant' or 'subversive' sexualities are worth celebrating—because I'm a Marxist and a Freudian and think all living humans unbullied by vicars and academics are capable of erotically-charged relations to anyone and anything—I'm not just 'reactionary', but 'profoundly' so. This is someone whose line on sexuality was established by Sheila MacGregor some thirty years ago—adopting the worst moralism and reality-evasion of the Women's Movement—and hasn't had a thoughtful time with a free hand and a fresh erotic idea since.
In his last comments, Birchall the Unshakeable appears very shaky indeed. Here he's run out of 'Marxist' arguments completely, and resorts to the oldest trick in the academic lexicon: Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of signs. No matter that there isn't a mention of Saussure in the book (Birchall must be recalling an old enthusiasm of mine for Valentin Volosinov, who laid the groundwork for a Marxist and revolutionary semiotics), Birchall can tell me with authority—being a Professor of French Studies—that I haven't "understood Saussure's theory of language". Well, that's for a very good reason: as a Marxist, I completely disagree with Saussure's blatant idealism (an idealism which underlies all the Parisian exports, from Althusser through to Badiou and Rancière). Prefering Wittgenstein to Freud, Birchall plumps for authorised abstractions versus analysis of the quivering pschophysique: that's well and good for the political-party neuroses of the repressed, mais ce n'est pas Marxisme, mon ami.
Ben Watson, Camden, 12-x11-2011
Ian's original review can be read here >>
--
1. Editor: He's quoted favourably by Andy Wilson in the Preface too, Ben. And since that quote is about production/poesis versus bureaucratic fiat, we'll mention it again here: "Benjamin says that, when he mentioned ‘Lukács, Gábot and Kurella… [and] people like this’, Brecht commented; ‘They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable. You never know where you are with production; production is the unforseeable. You never know what’s going to come out. And they themselves don’t want to produce. They want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat’. Walter Benjamin, ‘Conversations With Brecht’, tr. Anya Bostock, in Adorno, et al., Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso Books, 2007, p. 97." - TGE
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Massive Head
Beers! Laughs! Free Admission!
Upstairs at The Blue Posts, Rupert Court/Rupert Street, London, W1 (MAP)
7pm Thursday 15th December 2011
all welcome
Videos from the last AMM meeting can still be seen here >>
Thursday, 1 December 2011
THF Drenching: Jeff Keen Flix: More NEWS Than Most People Can STAND
[More NEWS Than Most People Can STAND1]
“When it wants to destroy, the creative blood attains geyser-force and collective, non-zoological vitality is heralded, inscribed in short-hand on the piano of anti-artistic isthmuses”
Tristan Tzara, 1919 2
I don’t want to rehearse the facts of Jeff Keen’s life, you can find that out by reading other articles. I want to talk about how his films FEEL and what they might MEAN. The first and most obvious thing to say is that these films are FAST. That’s not just a quantitative description but a qualitative one. These films are fast in the way that Not I is fast, or Roger Turner’s drumming is fast, or Tautologos 1 is fast, or Mincemeat See-Saw is fast, or Pharoahe Monch’s verse in Bring It On is fast: in a way that uses different registers and techniques with such precision and speed as to dislocate perception and create vertigo. As such, they’re difficult to describe, as they must be.3
So to start with some inadvisable prosaic rendering: In Rayday Film (1968-70, with a final edit in 1976) a cut-out of Blake’s 1795 print of Nebuchadnezzar (adapted from an earlier print in one of the BEST BOOKS: The Marriage of Heaven & Hell) crawls at spider-speed past a felt-tipped pin-up and punk-Klee masks, only to be blasted by a burning asteroid and erupt into a medical encyclopaedia which immediately transforms into a patchwork of Léger Tubist-vines, magazine foliage and coy glamour-shots; royal blue airbrush spray marked “Jungle Vapours”. A characteristic passage which last four seconds. Examples could be multiplied endlessly. Taking only the early Cineblatz, a spectacularly dense three-minute film, and merely attempting to describe the onscreen events would produce a document of thousands of words.
Not that such a document could hope to approximate the film: Keen’s work bristles with hostility to words, hostility to literary representation itself. Throughout these films, anti-word (wordist?) slogans appear: “BLATZFAST TRAVELS FASTER THAN WORDS” (From Blatzom (1983-1986)), “KILL THE WORD, BEFORE THE WORD KILLS YOU”, (on various placards, and at least once, spread out as a concrete poem in the Schwitters tradition) or formulations involving the ubiquitous Dexter Duke as Motler The Word Killer: “MOTLER ZAPS THE WORD” or “HOW RIGHT MOTLER WAS TO KILL THE WORD!!!” This is a pathological mistrust of mediation, what can’t be approached directly through the eyes and ears is suspect. Words, those reality-coupons, are discounted, torn up and incinerated. This psychotic empiricism separates Keen from his Surrealist forebears: the “revolution of the word” has become the “abolition of the word”; his scorched page aesthetic means he’s unlikely to be naming a journal 'Littérature'.
Something like Cineblatz, taken frame-by-frame, yields up an incredible quantity of data. These films are not just FAST but extremely DENSE. Since the advent of DVD, or earlier VHS home video, it’s been possible to isolate and view these frames, but in 1967, when Cineblatz was constructed, these films were shown to audiences at full speed, in public venues, with no opportunity for a pause-button-re-run, and most likely with Keen and his entourage performing in front of the screen too. The best chance you might get for detailed further study was an encore. Even after multiple viewings, it’s inconceivable that some, or even MOST, of this data wouldn’t be lost to the naked eye. The point isn’t that Keen predicted the technology needed to view these films 'properly': the means to stop these things moving and look at them as a series of easel paintings. That’s like using Joyce’s preparatory notes to whittle Finnegan’s Wake back down to a Bourgeois novel: idiotic. The point is that’s it’s MEANT to push your eye and brain to the edge of cognition, to the edge of what you can physically process: “At 24fps the brain trembles”. Which is to say that the overload is the real information. The primacy of overload disintegrates the very form: opening titles of forthcoming features – Graffico-Raze, Panic News, Virus Scatter, Tee Vee Whisper s-s-s-s, Word Melt – are abandoned, recycled and subsumed before they’ve even started – caught up in the irresistible turbine. Likewise, endings – 'Happy Ending', 'The End', 'Part Two'–appear scattered throughout, like dead roadsigns in molten magma.
Melting takes the place of Varese’s crystallisation as an organising principle, a passing speech bubble reads: “...CUT UP... MELT DOWN... RESPRAY!!” But this isn’t Boulez still amending Douze notations fifty years after they were composed. This isn’t a process of gradual refinement, chiselling down or amplifying of a motif, it’s a real demolition, leaving only the faintest traces of the individual artwork. Closer in spirit to what Boulez’s cleaner did to his lost symphony.4 Keen came up with the later concept of “Artwar” as a method of destroying his works: they can’t fit in the studio anymore, they’ve done their job, take them into a field and burn them: “SHOOT IT THEN DISSOLVE IT AWAY!” as a rifleman shouts, taking aim at a another cancelled pin-up on the cover of Keen’s 1962 'secret comic', Amazing Rayday.
“This is a copy – Where’s THE ORIGINAL?” queries a Dick Tracy-face detective. Well, as with Keen’s friend Bob Cobbing’s5 concrete poems, produced on a photocopier, there ARE no originals. The 'originals' are burned, torn up, left rotting at the tip, thrown in the Brighton surf, covered in raspberry jelly, unexhibitable. Recent showings of Keen’s paintings and drawings in Paris and Brighton are all of 'previously unseen' work some of it going back to the 50’s. 'Unseen' not because Keen is, that boring outré tag, 'a recluse', or because he’s some undergrounder-than-thou elitist who won’t show his hand, but because these aren’t 'easel paintings' made for exhibition, they’re just congealed sparks that flew off 'The Big Engine'6, no more or less important than the 'My First Sony' computer-drawings that are immediately erased in Omozap Terribelis, the molten plastic that looks like burned goats’ cheese, or one of Jackie Keen’s ever-ready fake plastic fingertips.
This makes Keen’s work singularly unsuited to curation. Efforts currently being made to get this unbelievable quantity of STUFF catalogued and defined are heroic, like trying to freeze Old Faithful with disconnected fridge-freezer-feed. Since Keen started producing art in the late-40s, his work has existed in a continuous flux, used, destroyed, re-animated, re-edited. So there’s something anachronistic about the BFI putting out 'GAZWRX: The Films of Jeff Keen'7, with that organisation’s stated aim of “preserving and restoring the most significant film collection in the world for today and future generations”. Like all modern art worth its salt, Keen’s work has a distinctly ambivalent attitude towards its own claims to quality and 'significance', and to attempts by institutions to fix its value. The final message which abruptly fills the screen after the preposterous closing section of Meatdaze: “Made with the assistance of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE PRODUCTION BOARD” didn’t make me roll my eyes, or question Keen’s independence, but BURST OUT LAUGHING. He doesn’t play by the rules: he reuses old footage continually, chunks of old films appear pasted into new ones, things that seem utterly unfinished and inscrutable, like Blazon Blatzom: El Pistolera Blatzo, sit next to highly-conceptualised, formally-integral works. Complete stand-alone works like ArtWar 3: Irresistible Attack are presented only in twin-screen format, combined with other films. His silent films are silent only because they don’t happen to have a soundtrack, But they may well pick one up at a later date, like Instant Cinema, a silent film made in 1964-65 which didn’t get its soundtrack until 2007. Rayday Film was a 'finished' multiple projection piece until Keen chopped it together into something different in 1976. The “fastest films alive” sit next to lengthy montaged 'diary films' of family holidays, air shows and birthday parties, replete with passages of cheap action adventure and monster movie pastiche.
Keen is consistently drawn back to the same varied barrage of effects and concerns8, but there’s nothing here you could call a 'style'. The materials themselves erupt and spew, can’t be contained. Nothing as tepid as a 'stylistic concern' is going to stop them fizzing. What happens is what needs to happen to make the rubbish talk. Svankmajer makes commodities stand on their head, evolve strange ideas in their wooden brains, gang together and do us in.9 Keen’s pound-shop surrealism envisages US as commodities, pushed around, liquidised and shot at. The melted Action Man knee that fills the screen in 1995’s ArtWar 3: Irresistible Attack is YOUR KNEE, and when it looms into view it FEELS LIKE IT. Of course, there’s no time to mourn, because here’s MORE and MORE and MORE of it, faster than you can assimilate, faster than you can flinch.
It’s a kind of punk-Romanticism that salvages the progressive strands of hippiedom (sometimes it’s difficult to remember that there ARE any, but there are: collectivity, sexual liberation, the demolition of 50’s repression) by combining them with the hardest edge of Romantic thought (“Get me Sam T. Coleridge on the melting brain line!” is a favourite slogan, Blake’s “Every line has a meaning” is quoted approvingly in a Keen manifesto10) and leavening them with Dada nihilism. As his work crossed over from the 70s into the 80s, there’s the familiar pattern found in all radical art as it crosses the line into hostile territory: under the reign of Thatcher, the market and the Yuppies, the soft collectivity splinters, or at least goes underground, a harder face appears: the Freaks turn into Punks. Dr Gaz, the sinister, but rather quaint Mad Scientist becomes OMOZAP, Homo Zapiens, the ultimate Futurist, no longer defined by his wisdom, but by his ZAP: the artist as lone gunslinger.
It may seem, when Keen rails against “materialists & social reformers” who “try to capture the ARTMONSTER in SOCIALart trap, in order to isolate, & defuse, his mysterious power-source”11 , that Keen’s Romanticism is simply an individualist protest on behalf of an art loftily opposed to all social meaning. But it could only seem that way to someone who’d never seen the work itself: these films are saturated with social meaning, the stuff they transform and reconfigure is the detritus of human society: magazines, comics, newspapers, plastic toys, newsreels, cartoons, Hollywood films, not some natural sublime, some precious 'innerness'. If these films have an individualist agenda, then the individual imagined is a composite form, made of social rubbish, animated by creative Energy, that Eternal Delight. This is a Romanticism that has more in common with the Situationist slogan “All power to the imagination” than it does with ''l'art pour l'art'', and its “theology of art”.12
And when Keen speaks later in another manifesto of “the dictatorship of photo-naturalist figuration”13 it becomes clear that his target is not “materialism”, not the Trotskyism of Breton, but Social Realism. Keen stands with Joyce and Bloch against Lukács and Radek. He stands not for the abstract filling in of old forms with “revolutionary” content, but for an indivisible form, content and technique that is a realisation of concrete philosophy. Like any free improvisor, he wants an art made “at the lightning point where the nervous tic, the muscular surge, & the imagination fight it out”.14 IT’S ALIVE: and that’s why Jeff Keen makes experimental film that you don’t have to sit through, subject yourself to for the good of culture, wondering when it’ll end.
Stuart Calton
and/or
THF Drenching
Longsight, November 2011
--
1. Subtitle of 'Panic News', a subsection of Victory Thru Film Power, 1980s.
2. Tristan Tzara, Lampisterie on Francis Picabia “l’athlète des pompes funèbres” “rateliers platoniques”, 1919.
3. Although Keen has such blithe disregard for the traditional 'light and shade' of formal design, that his films are also differently fast.
4. In 1947, Pierre Boulez composed his one and only symphony. It has never been heard, for shortly after completing a work he still regards as the summation of everything he knew up to that point, it got thrown on the fire by Boulez’s over-zealous cleaner when she was tidying his desk.
5. Cobbing founded the London Film-Maker’s Co-op, for which body Keen made The Five Fingers Of Dr Gaz in July 1976 (and which was later incorporated in The Cartoon Theatre of Dr Gaz), and along with Keen and Annea Lockwood, recorded the soundtrack to 1967’s Marvo Movie, sounding disconcertingly similar to Return Of The Son of Monster Magnet; “what freaks sound like when you turn them loose in a recording studio at one o'clock in the morning...” according to Frank Zappa in the sleevenotes to Freak Out! released the year before Marvo Movie. SEE Marvo Movie HERE:
6.
H2O
From HOMER to OMOZAP
From the poem of actions
To action-poem
From DEEPWAR
To BIO-GRAFIK-BLATZ
The song turns full circle
As the fast gun fires the nerve
In ARTWAR: The Big Engine.
(poem reprinted in Prisoner of Art, an A4 booklet with DVD-r available only from Keen himself. See: kinoblatz.com/html/prisoner.html)
7. It’s a fucking good job they did, otherwise, not being a film buff, I’d never have seen any of them.
8. to those that say, like “the infidels who claim that all Funkadelic albums look alike!” on the reverse of One Nation Under A Groove, “SAME OLE SHIT” – THIS IS CAPITALISM, FOOLS: if you’re not talking about sex, war, commodity life, then what ARE you talking about?"
9. See ALL OF THEM, IMMEDIATELY, but perhaps particularly those left steaming on the table after revolution hit Europe: Picnic with Weissmann (1968) and A Quiet Week In The House (1969). Jan Svankmajer remains the only man who could FILM Marx’s Capital. And he could do it without needing to add anything to his vocabulary. I wish he’d just fucking DO IT.
10. From “THE HAND DRAWN MESSAGE:”, undated and reprinted in the booklet for “GAZWRX”, BFI, 2009.
11. From “RETUNE YR ORACLES:”, also undated and also reprinted in the booklet for “GAZWRX”, BFI, 2009.
12. Walter Benjamin pointed out in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935): “If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war.” A sort of 'libido-theory' of war, and a restatement of the formula: 'Socialism or barbarism'. He concludes: “Fiat ars—pereat mundus” ["Let art be created. Let the world perish"] says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of l’art pour l’art.”, a description of fascist Futurism that chimes disconcertingly with Keen’s 'Artwar'. The splitting of early 20th Century Modern Art into a left (Dadaism, Russian Futurism) and a right (Vorticism, Italian Futurism) has not been clean. Traces of revolution hang around in the body of Futurism. Likewise, the ghost of reaction haunts Tzara: those elements of Nietzschean bluster still traceable in the Dada manifesti (of which his later “quasi-buddhist” interpretation of Dada is the flip-side, see his rather poor 1922 Lecture on Dada) are not of the Left. The definitive Dada-Bolshivik critique of Futurism, which would rescue both Tzara and Keen from Right deviations, remains to be written...
13. From 'THE HAND DRAWN MESSAGE:', as above.
14. Again from 'THE HAND DRAWN MESSAGE:', as above.
“When it wants to destroy, the creative blood attains geyser-force and collective, non-zoological vitality is heralded, inscribed in short-hand on the piano of anti-artistic isthmuses”
Tristan Tzara, 1919 2
Stuart Calton
and/or
THF Drenching
Longsight, November 2011
--
1. Subtitle of 'Panic News', a subsection of Victory Thru Film Power, 1980s.
2. Tristan Tzara, Lampisterie on Francis Picabia “l’athlète des pompes funèbres” “rateliers platoniques”, 1919.
3. Although Keen has such blithe disregard for the traditional 'light and shade' of formal design, that his films are also differently fast.
4. In 1947, Pierre Boulez composed his one and only symphony. It has never been heard, for shortly after completing a work he still regards as the summation of everything he knew up to that point, it got thrown on the fire by Boulez’s over-zealous cleaner when she was tidying his desk.
5. Cobbing founded the London Film-Maker’s Co-op, for which body Keen made The Five Fingers Of Dr Gaz in July 1976 (and which was later incorporated in The Cartoon Theatre of Dr Gaz), and along with Keen and Annea Lockwood, recorded the soundtrack to 1967’s Marvo Movie, sounding disconcertingly similar to Return Of The Son of Monster Magnet; “what freaks sound like when you turn them loose in a recording studio at one o'clock in the morning...” according to Frank Zappa in the sleevenotes to Freak Out! released the year before Marvo Movie. SEE Marvo Movie HERE:
6.
H2O
From HOMER to OMOZAP
From the poem of actions
To action-poem
From DEEPWAR
To BIO-GRAFIK-BLATZ
The song turns full circle
As the fast gun fires the nerve
In ARTWAR: The Big Engine.
(poem reprinted in Prisoner of Art, an A4 booklet with DVD-r available only from Keen himself. See: kinoblatz.com/html/prisoner.html)
7. It’s a fucking good job they did, otherwise, not being a film buff, I’d never have seen any of them.
8. to those that say, like “the infidels who claim that all Funkadelic albums look alike!” on the reverse of One Nation Under A Groove, “SAME OLE SHIT” – THIS IS CAPITALISM, FOOLS: if you’re not talking about sex, war, commodity life, then what ARE you talking about?"
9. See ALL OF THEM, IMMEDIATELY, but perhaps particularly those left steaming on the table after revolution hit Europe: Picnic with Weissmann (1968) and A Quiet Week In The House (1969). Jan Svankmajer remains the only man who could FILM Marx’s Capital. And he could do it without needing to add anything to his vocabulary. I wish he’d just fucking DO IT.
10. From “THE HAND DRAWN MESSAGE:”, undated and reprinted in the booklet for “GAZWRX”, BFI, 2009.
11. From “RETUNE YR ORACLES:”, also undated and also reprinted in the booklet for “GAZWRX”, BFI, 2009.
12. Walter Benjamin pointed out in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935): “If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war.” A sort of 'libido-theory' of war, and a restatement of the formula: 'Socialism or barbarism'. He concludes: “Fiat ars—pereat mundus” ["Let art be created. Let the world perish"] says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of l’art pour l’art.”, a description of fascist Futurism that chimes disconcertingly with Keen’s 'Artwar'. The splitting of early 20th Century Modern Art into a left (Dadaism, Russian Futurism) and a right (Vorticism, Italian Futurism) has not been clean. Traces of revolution hang around in the body of Futurism. Likewise, the ghost of reaction haunts Tzara: those elements of Nietzschean bluster still traceable in the Dada manifesti (of which his later “quasi-buddhist” interpretation of Dada is the flip-side, see his rather poor 1922 Lecture on Dada) are not of the Left. The definitive Dada-Bolshivik critique of Futurism, which would rescue both Tzara and Keen from Right deviations, remains to be written...
13. From 'THE HAND DRAWN MESSAGE:', as above.
14. Again from 'THE HAND DRAWN MESSAGE:', as above.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)