Surgical Self Injury

Love is the most beautiful of dreams and the worst of nightmares

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:59:02 GMT

Nightmares and Disorders of Dreaming

Dreams occur during all stages of sleep. Nightmares are common. They can be associated with poor sleep and diminished daytime performance. Frequent nightmares are not related to underlying psychopathology in most children and in some "creative" adults. However, recurrent nightmares are the most defining symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder and may be associated with other psychiatric illnesses. Night terrors are arousal disorders that occur most often in children and usually occur early in the sleep period. Patients with rapid-eye-movement behavior disorder often present with nocturnal injury resulting from the acting out of dreams. Dream disorders may respond to medication, but behavioral treatment approaches have shown excellent results, particularly in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder and recurrent nightmares.

A dream is the recall of mental activity that has occurred during sleep. Using polysomnography, sleep can be divided into stage 1 (sleep onset), stage 2 (light sleep) and stages 3 and 4 (deep sleep)--the nonrapid-eye-movement (REM) stages. REM sleep occurs cyclically every 90 minutes during the night in association with high brain activity, rapid spontaneous eye movements and suppressed voluntary motor activity. Dreaming occurs in all stages of sleep. It is reported by 80 percent of persons who are awakened during REM sleep and sleep onset (stages 1 and 2), and 40 percent of persons who are awakened from a deep sleep.

Patient reports about the content of their dreams vary based on the sleep stage from which they are awakened. Patient reports of dreams experienced during REM sleep tend to be bizarre and detailed, with storyline plot associations. In contrast, dreams experienced in deep sleep are more diffuse (e.g., dreams about a color or an emotion). The dreams of stages 1 and 2 are simpler, shorter and have fewer associations than the dreams of REM sleep. The ability to recall dreams may reflect the dream's accessibility or distance from awake thought; the highest recall seems to occur during sleep stages with electroencephalographic patterns that are most like those in the waking state.

Some researchers believe that dreams have no function. Others think that dreams are the nocturnal continuation of conscious thought processing during the day or a reprogramming of the central nervous system for the next day's conscious functioning. Evidence suggests that dreaming, like most other physiologic events, is important for learning and memory processing, gives cognitive feedback about a person's mental functioning and helps a person adapt to emotional and physical stress.

The Nightmare

Nightmares are vivid and terrifying nocturnal episodes in which the dreamer is abruptly awakened from sleep. Typically, the dreamer wakes from REM sleep and is able to describe a detailed, associative, often bizarre dream plot. Usually, the dreamer has difficulty returning to sleep. Nightmares are also common. In a two-week prospective study of college students, 47 percent described having at least one nightmare. Results of a general population study of 1,049 persons with insomnia revealed that 18.3 percent had nightmares. In this study, nightmares were more common in women and were associated with increases in nocturnal awakenings, sleep onset insomnia, and daytime memory impairment and anxiety following poor nocturnal sleep. Studies of the general population reveal that 5 to 8 percent of the adult population report a current problem with nightmares

Nightmares affect 20 to 39 percent of children between five and 12 years of age. Contrary to popular belief, frequent nightmares in children do not suggest underlying psychopathology. Nightmares are often described by creative persons who demonstrate "thin boundaries" on psychologic tests. Persons with thin boundaries are less likely than others to define the world around them in concrete terms. They rarely define issues as being black and white, but instead see themselves and the world in shades of gray.

Nightmares are also associated with the use of medication, primarily those medications that affect neurotransmitter levels of the central nervous system, such as antidepressants, narcotics or barbiturates. Intense, frightening dreams may occur during the withdrawal of drugs that cause REM sleep rebound, such as ethanol, barbiturates and benzodiazepines

Nightmares and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Nightmares are a defining symptom in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The latter is not a new disorder. In 1667, after the great fire of London, Samuel Pepys wrote, "To this very day I cannot sleep a-night without great terrors of the fire." Nightmares related to PTSD occur after an intensely frightening or highly emotional experience. These nightmares are often associated with disturbed sleep and altered daytime behavior, which is best described as hyperarousability.

The occurrence of PTSD following trauma varies. Thirty percent of veterans of the Vietnam War were affected by PTSD, as were 68 percent of veterans who were in the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973 and 8 percent of veterans of the Gulf War. Among the civilian population, PTSD affects approximately 25 percent of persons who have experienced emotional and physical trauma or have suffered a severe medical illness. However, among some groups of patients, such as immigrant psychiatric patients, the incidence of PTSD approaches 40 percent.

The frequency of PTSD increases with severity of trauma, hostility, depression, poor health habits and poor coping skills. Persons with PTSD generally report awakening from dreams that involve reliving the trauma. In these dreams, they experience strong emotions, such as rage, intense fear or grief, that would have been appropriate reactions to the original traumatic event. Nightmares related to PTSD generally happen during REM sleep but also occur at sleep onset, which can interfere with the initiation of sleep. Polysomnographic studies in these patients have shown that they have poor sleep maintenance, increased eye movement density, decreased percentage of REM sleep and an increased tendency to have REM sleep at sleep onset (REM pressure). This phenomenon is similar to that occurring in patients with narcolepsy.

Symptoms of PTSD can persist for decades after the traumatic experience; however, the occurrence of PTSD after trauma is the exception rather than the rule.20 Patients who experience PTSD are divided into two groups based on the presence or absence of impaired psychologic functioning before the trauma.

Nightmares and Psychiatric Illness

Nightmares can occur in patients with psychiatric illness. Depression is sometimes associated with themes of masochism and poor self-image in dreams. Patients with schizophrenia and dissociative disorders may have intense dreams during a relapse of the illness. Panic attacks can occur during REM sleep in patients who have panic disorders and depression, and in patients who have asthma and breathing disorders of sleep. The REM sleep rebound related to withdrawal from alcohol and sedative-hypnotics, which chronically suppress REM sleep, may present as disturbing nightmares.

REM-SleepAssociated Disorders

A strong association exists between REM sleep and dreaming. Most frightening dreams occur during REM sleep, and most REM-altering disorders and medications affect dreaming. A variety of REM-associated parasomnias can alter dreaming.Symptoms of underlying illness can also occur during REM sleep. It often happens that persons awakening from REM sleep, a state that is electrophysiologically near waking, recall the mentation and physical symptoms associated with the state of REM sleep

REM Behavior Disorder

REM behavior disorder most commonly affects middle-aged men. Patients with this disorder often present with a history of sleep-associated injuries to themselves or a sleeping partner. REM behavior disorder is characterized by vivid, action-filled, violent dreams that the dreamer acts out, sometimes resulting in injury to the dreamer or the sleeping partner. On polysomnography, these patients show elevated submental and limb electromyographic tone, which may be phasic or tonic and that is associated with prominent jerking of the limb or truncal areas.

REM behavior disorder often occurs without concomittant pathophysiology, but can be associated with neurodegenerative neurologic disorders. The most common of these disorders are Parkinson's disease, primary dementia and narcolepsy. Computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging brain scans of affected patients may show diffuse hemispheric lesions, bilateral thalamic abnormalities or brain stem lesions.

Night Terrors

Night terrors are nocturnal episodes of extreme terror and panic that usually occur early in the sleep period. They are similar to other arousal disorders that occur during deep sleep, such as somnambulism (sleepwalking) and confusional arousals. Night terrors are associated with autonomic discharge, confusion and vocalizations, often a "blood-curdling" scream. Persons with night terrors are often difficult to arouse and have limited recall of their dream content. Night terrors can occur in association with the other arousal disorders that are associated with deep sleep Night terrors are most common in children between four and 12 years of age and affect 1 to 4 percent of the population. Polysomnographic studies in these patients generally show increased arousals from deep sleep.

Adults who have night terrors are more likely than children to have psychopathology, mainly substance abuse and affective disorders. As with other parasomnias that affect adults, night terrors are more likely to occur in association with other sleep pathology, such as periodic limb movements and obstructive sleep apnea.

Medications Known to Cause Nightmares

Medications that alter central nervous system neurotransmitter levels
Antidepressants
Tricyclic
Monoamine oxidase inhibitors
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
Centrally acting antihypertensives
Beta blockers
Rauwolfia alkaloids
Alpha agonists
Antiparkinsonian agents
Levodopa (Larodopa)
Selegiline (Eldepryl)

Miscellaneous medications known to cause nightmares
Flutamide (Eulexin)
Procarbazine (Matulane)
Ketamine (Ketalar)
Short-acting barbiturates

Medication withdrawal associated with nightmares
Ethanol
Barbiturates
Benzodiazepines

REM Sleep Parasomnias and Arousal Disorders

Arousal disorders (usually associated with deep sleep)
Confusional arousals
Sleepwalking
Sleep terrors

Parasomnias (usually associated with REM sleep)
Nightmares
Sleep paralysis
Impaired sleep-related penile erections
Sleep-related painful erections
REM-sleeprelated sinus arrest
REM sleep behavior disorder

I got what you need.

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:45:56 GMT

.

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 09:48:31 GMT

drtenge

is my hero.

medicated

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:57:31 GMT

Je veux vous tuer

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 04:28:22 GMT

Schools are miniature universes.
They encompass, on a childs scale, the same kind of domination and repression as the most despotically organised societies.
A similar sort of injustice and comparable baseness preside over their choice of idols to elevate and martyrs to torment.
-Octave Mirbeau

Deconstruction of Music, Culture, and a Freedom Towards Noise Aesthetics

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 04:17:40 GMT

Deconstruction of Music, Culture, and a Freedom Towards Noise Aesthetic

Music is the pleasing combination of sound distinct in its form and its affect on the perceiver. The antithesis of music is properly identified as noise, the sounds disagreeable to auditory experience. It is the unwanted frequencies left over from the aesthetic harmony of music which displeases the senses only because primitive (natural) sound is not dressed up with the conventional variety of tones and timbres from fanciful instruments. Tolstoy claimed that folk music was the best of all the genres because it was the most sincere. Similarly, the industrial world is filled with varieties of sounds from horns, trains, machinery, and deterioration. Noise than, is the modern natural acoustic, the sound that is has become natural and usually unnoticed...

...And when it is brought to the surface of awareness it is unappreciated because it is unwanted, that is, any sound, voice, or imposing image (such as television) will invoke in us annoyance if it interrupts our primary concerns. Sound is a primitive, simple frequency, and as such, it only gets its formal beauty through the manifestation of man made instruments. Aesthetic theories usually attempt to label art for its necessary and sufficient conditions, and the good theories, would not make judgments about taste, about how beautiful or ugly a work of art is since there is a fine line between art and non-art. And I argue that noise, does have unique formal qualities just like regular music with its dynamic harmonies and that by having an open-ear noise can be put on the same sphere as music.

In the twentieth century music was freed from intellectual bourgeois institutions by creating sound from pure chance and through unconventional mediums in the hands of non-professional musicians. Starting from the early 1900's, The Futurists Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo declared war on the beautiful past of musical history because it was time to embrace and understand the noise of the growing industrial cities. Luigi Russolo proposed 6 categories of noise which can be used in a symphony without reliance on traditional instruments after he was inspired by Pratellas performance using the intonarumori (noise intoners): primitive mechanical or electrical (records are unclear) processors of sound to which the audience of the day blasphemized and ridiculed. But, Russolo delights: to attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular movements and vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give gradation and tone to the most strongly predominant of these vibrations. Noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity. Every noise has a tone, and sometimes also a harmony that predominates over the body of its irregular vibrations (Russolo, Art of Noise Manifesto).
Pitch and frequency are the spine of music and it is evident that, sound, and music, differ in most cases as being intentional versus unintentional in their execution. Musical instruments provide the output for the primitive vibrations so that the frequencies are processed by the instruments to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre. Sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, created music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolatable and sacred world. By habit these arrangements are valued for their truly beautiful harmony and unique enchantment, infusing the notion that intentional compositions speak to the soul more profoundly than if the listener were daydreaming in the park surrounded by a full orchestra of sounds coming from the birds, the wind, the loud construction site a few feet away from him, or waves crashing on the shore. It should be considered successful if the arts presence infuses us with the slightest reaction of contemplation or emotion however ugly or beautiful.

Noise frequencies are like the constantans in the alphabet, because of their quick and harsh nature, so when there are too many of them together in one word, like in the Germanic languages, the inexperienced person will find it vexating to understand and appreciate. If, as it has been well argued numerous times, that beauty is completely relative, than it should be easy to suffice that noise could be just as powerfully enjoyable as aesthetically pleasing music. The wise man shall never turn his back on ugly things, since in the profound ugliness can we really learn something about human nature. When faced with the deformity of life do we have the opportunity to really explore our fears, values, and against our standards of beauty. Noise has to contain judgment: it is 'unwanted'. Can noise be wanted - clearly that would then define the noise in question as not-noise. And if noise than is to be sought it may no longer possess the uneasiness it once did. Noise is no more original than music or meaning, and yet its position is to indicate the banished, overcome primordiality (Paul Hegarty, Full with Noise.)

So when non-professional musicians, with no prior training choose to create music out of non-musical objects the general approach was simply to evacuate reliance on order and beauty creating transgressive Industrial music on the grounds that the social definition of "taboo" or "transgressive" was just another method of control, of persuading people not to examine certain choices (Genesis P.Orridge, 2002). Noise music was explored through two different schools; one execution was through the academic circles, and the other through non-professional underground musicians. For the purpose of giving the most vivid presentation of noise, the underground artist explored its nature more profoundly and with a taste for rawness. Pure noise from a synthesizer, for many musicians, has a meditative atmosphere. Its minimalism provokes a Zen-state of loud nothingness. Japanese noise, (such as the leading project of Masami Akita, Merzbow) has its roots as much in free jazz, experimental rock music and contemporary classical music, primitive music, as in traditional or classical Japanese music. Part of the "noise" that unites highly disparate music under the banner of noise music is precisely a disruption of Western music and its genres.

Underground noise music at its present form most frequently acknowledges its cultural roots to the Industrial movement in London in the early 1970s, by the group Throbbing Gristle. Genesis P. Orridge, who has coined the term Industrial Music. Early industrial artists (arising primarily from Europe and the States): Genesis P.Orridge, Monte Cazazza and projects like Genocide Organ, Con-dom, Brighter Death Now, Whitehouse, manipulated the noise of the culture: rape, genocide, war, mass technology, hatred, fascinations for serial killers, and political terrorism by finding the most extreme medium for such harsh content; which gets processed through samples, noise loops, and environmental recordings in synthesizers and computers. Noise is the least common denominator of all music, it is the ugly skeleton clothed with beautiful sound. The ugly skeletons of the society are exhibited for the purpose of shock value and for expressing the disgust for the modern world by stabbing at its cavities.

Death and decay are a fitting subject matter for a music which is the abrasive negative of silence. Why is death believed to be silent? At a literal level it is noisy -- organs becoming extinct, collapsing, expanding, rotting --an endless carnival even before the arrival of other creatures. Death is silent in the sense of the subject not being there to hear it. Is this what occurs in Cage's silences? Is the hearing subject absented, rather than, as Cage wished, brought forcibly into the presence of sounds usually unheard? Silence, however, is structurally speaking, death. Noise explores the fall of order (at least in the western linear sense), death, like noise, is the unwanted leftover. Death in considered the end of life in Western culture, and not the counterbalance and rebirth of life, as in more cyclical Eastern philosophy. Noise is just as important, as organized sound, because without knowing profound ugliness and chaos, we will not have a background of which to appreciate beautiful compositions of the highest talent.

Shopenhauer (1961), in The World as Will and Idea wrote about the separate nature of music from all other arts; music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself, nay, even as the Ideas, whos multiplied manifestation constitutes the world of individual things. Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the ideas are. If this is so, that all music does not simply re-express Ideas by simply fitting another different form, but that it is made from the same place where Ideas, objects, and manifestations are made; from the will itself then, the offensiveness of of themes in music like Power Electronics, stem from the same interesting depth, as the power of both good and evil. Noise, death, and all despicable things have the power to move us to act, to feel, and to understand, so that when creating atonal, disordered music, it really shows the other side of the Will.

Aristotle believed that the changes produced in the individual through his experience of music are crucial. Music, he states, has power to mold the character: rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our own experiences, for in listening to such strains on our souls undergo a change (quote from Epperson, The Musical Symbol p. 35). By being exposed to this socially deviant content, one can get over the shock value, and be at comfort with real social problems and observe them with a detachment from personal bias. Music has the ability to transform the character, but the transformation can only be accomplished if it is as versatile as human character.

"Music expresses what cannot be put into words", that is the old clich of what music is and what it seeks to accomplish. It is the unconscious and illogical human nature manifested for social enjoyment. Classical compositions were for centuries locked inside a rigid logical system of musical language. At different historical dates, specific combination of notes were considered to be improperly deadly if played together in a particular scale and, others reminiscent of a lovers tragedy; as if the music itself had some objective emotional qualities. But then, by some 'brave' new experimental composer those very notes were used in compositions to excite emotional sympathy from the listener. Clearly musical language, like all other languages, is a cultural system and as such there is no innate basis for considering it a superior form of beauty. It is the molding of conventions that guides the audience's emotional experience, like a young child looking at his mother for proper social expression.

Music has its origins in the primitive un-intellectual depth of the unconscious. Aldous Huxley writes; an Indian, for example, finds European orchestral music intolerably noisy, complicated, over-intellectual, and inhuman. It seems incredible to him that any one should be able to perceive beauty and meaning, to recognize an expression of the deepest and subtlest emotions in this elaborate cacophony (Huxley: Beliefs, P.371). It is no wonder than that when observing young children, they are more open to unfamiliar sounds than highly cultivated professionals; prejudice is than acquired along with knowledge (Epperson: Musical Symbol, P.24). And even fetuses get conditioned to the familiar sounds of their mothers voice, when she reads them a story, so that when they are born and are read the story by two different voices, one by the mother and another by a stranger, the child will show signs of displeasure at the unfamiliar sound. Similarly, all sound has the potential to become an object of musical appreciation. Beyond this general assertion a lot of questions are still waiting to be experimentally checked in the field of the psychology of music related both to the complex and diversified nature of the musical stimuli and to the architectural and dynamic characteristics of the human mind, the system processing sequentially in time the incoming musical information. Moreover, culture and education, by different ways and in different measures, influence the cognitive processing of music, supplying arguments to more general nurture-culture controversy.

The Classical musicians seeks to express not the individual nature of their emotion but rather, their intellectual talents by writing elaborate scores where the sounds follow the notes, instead of the language following the idea. Music is valued for its exploration of the intangible spirit of emotions but, ironically, it accomplished this through the stubbornly valued precision of a mathematical craftsman. In order to communicate with the audience the composer picked the appropriate combinations of the musical language to excite common image, not a particular individual expression as valued by Collingwood. Thus, that sort of musical creation seems to rely more on the intellect than on the free emotions as a guide in transfusing the aesthetic quality of sound because the artists ambitions are enslaved by the particular language.

The understanding of actual sounds to indulge the listeners appreciation seem only second place to the appreciation of the form (arrangement of notes, scales etc). There by, if the form or the language were removed, the music should seem meaningless, chaotic, and aesthetically unpleasant. It is a flaw in human nature that we be so intoxicated by the need for order, prediction, and perfection that it traps us in the burden of all types of arbitrary forms of unfullfilment and dullness. When the form collapses, suddenly, the unwary listener shall not be at ease as far as what to make of the free flow of sounds whence the guide vanishes. But nature is not coherent, it is chaotic, disorderly. It is the realization of this helter-skelter kind of existence that makes us uneasy that we demand that nature be orderly. In contrast to order, noise seems disorderly and profound. But when listening to noise on a recording, we are forced to listen to noise, so that it takes control of our senses, and shows us its true character.

The processing of these sounds, and the processing of the samples of the explicit content, renders music a different quality of being all together different from any other art form. It has the ability to create a metaphysical atmosphere out of the mundane physical world. It is the right of any music lover or decent person to wonder why artists and musicians would chose to purposefully create noise which causes us to squint in displeasure, and to purposefully add more displeasure by the unpleasantness of its subject matters. However, it is worth mentioning that not all the noise musicians focus on such deliberate shock imagery; in most cases it is less implicit or not the essence of the exploration at all but rather only the noise is. Noise can be made musical, by taking advantage of the processing technology of the synthesizer and computer. Harmony and a special tonality is naturally reserved in all sound, including the drones noise creates in a variety of circumstances. Its ability to transform ones environment is created with equal amount of force as traditional music. All music imposes another dimension on the listeners reality. Japanese noise, which can be imagined as the sound of a 2 vacuum cleaners attacking one anothers vibrations, is more minimal, stable, and raw. Its spiritual quality is reminiscent of the ancient mystical rituals, where music has the ability to invoke the human spirit and transform physical reality so that one is able to enter a metaphysical plane. And by being exposed to any form of music which involves recordings of environment, requires the ability to attune oneself to the fine frequencies in the musical piece and to listen how it accomplishes the rise and transformation of its own sound, changes the listeners world of auditory experience forever, because now, every sound in the world is louder, finer, and naturally harmonious so that music can be tuned in at any moment in the day.

works cited:

1.Epperson, Gordon. The Musical Symbol: A study of the Philosophic Theory of Music. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press., 1967.

2.Huxley, Aldous. Beliefs, Collected Essays. New York: Harper & Brothers., 1958.

3.Scarborough, Kim (maintains the site). Futurism Manifestos. June 14, 2002.
< http://www.unkn...nu/futurism/>

4.Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday & Company., 1961.

by some fucker named TangledTale

Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 04:15:17 GMT

1. Scratching the Surface
------------------------

"Full with Noise,..." is about noise music, specifically the version that has come to be called Japanese Noise -- itself composed of many different strands. The first half deals with the question of noise. What is it, whose is it, and how can we think about it. Also, how does noise inflect our thinking, rather than being an object; at what point does noise lose its noiseness and become meaning, music, signification? Or -- is there even a point where noise can subsist? Mostly, the text below takes the view that noise is a function of not-noise, itself a function of not being noise. Noise is no more original than music or meaning, and yet its position is to indicate the banished, overcome primordiality, and cannot lose this 'meaning'. Noise, then, is neither the outside of language nor music, nor is it simply categorisable, at some point or other, as belonging exclusively to the world of meaning, understanding, truth and knowledge. Instead, noise operates as a function of differance. If this term is what indicates and is subsequently elided, in/as the play of inside and outside (of meaning, truth, language, culture....), then we can form another binary with identity on one side and differance on the other, but with this difference - that differance is both one term in the binary, and that which is the operation of the binary. This is what noise is/does/is not. For Douglas Kahn, noise drifts across the binary empirical/abstract, such that "when noise itself is being communicated, [...] it no longer remains inextricably locked into empiricism but it transformed into an abstraction of another noise" [1]. In other words, noise is (taken to be) empirical, belonging to the world that is there in itself, a world of sounds without conscious sources. When such a view is mobilised, by the dadas, the futurists and so on, then noise becomes second order: a demonstration of the noise that subsists beyond.

As Kahn rightly notes, there is no noise without the thought of noise, and ideas about sound can therefore "make an audible event called noise louder than it might already be" [2] - noises come from specific places and specific conceptualisations. At some level, the use of noise is a bid (however unwitting) to master it (at least in Western modernism), and reduce its quality as noise: "avant-garde noise, in other words, both marshals and mutes the noise of the other: power is attacked at the expense of the less powerful, and society itself is both attacked and reinforced" [3]. This of course includes the "actual" others of the Western male - woman and the foreign other particularly significant here. For the purposes of this essay, it is the use of the exotic other that might be at stake. Kahn observes that the early modernists" love of "the primitive" led them to (in)appropriate so-called primitive musics, and "thus, the grinding sound of power relations are heard here in the way noises contain the other, in both senses of the word" [4].

Perhaps this is what is going on in trying to theorise Japanese noise music, even when rendering this a theoretical agent. Maybe crucial cultural elements are missing, leading to presumptions about what is being produced, based on underinformed hearing. This may be so. But what needs to be added is that if noise is to be noise, then an authentic reading (of true meaning) cannot be, cannot take place. More importantly, Japanese noise has its roots as much in free jazz, experimental rock music and contemporary classical music, as in traditional or classical Japanese musics. Part of the "noise" that unites highly disparate musics under the banner of noise music is precisely a disruption of Western music and its genres.

Japanese Noise music has existed since the early 1970s, and since the late 1980s has been increasingly influential. This essay concentrates on the figure seen to epitomise Japanese noise: Merzbow, essentially the work of Masami Akita, and even then, only a tiny fraction of his output. The second half of the essay, including the conclusion, is an attempt to create a Merzbow/theory object -- failing.

II. Scraped Subjectivity
------------------------

A recent exploratory political document states that "noise is sound which has a negative effect on people (unwanted sound)."[5] According to C.S. Kerse, noise is "sound which is undesired by the recipient", "a sound without musical quality or an unwanted or undesired sound" (The Law Relating to Noise, 8)[6]. Noise, then is subjective, and this is what vexes the Law, which exists, according to Jacques Attali, as result of the transformation of noise into music, into a regulated system, which heralds all regulated systems, all that comes from the buried sacrifice at the origin of society.

Attali: "Primordially the production of music has as its function the creation, legitimation and maintenance of order. Its primary function is not to be sought in aesthetics, which is a modern invention, but in the effectiveness of its participation in social regulation. Music - pleasure in the spectacle of murder, organizer of the simulacrum masked beneath festival and transgression - creates order"[7].

Is noise subjective? Could we not instead say that noise has to do with the subject: that which occurs as/at the limit of the subject; that which signals an immanence outside of the subject/object divide, however reclothed in phenomenology? It would not then be enough to say "one person's noise is another's music" in some liberalist fantasy - rather we would have to acknowledge the constructedness of the "subjectivity of noise".

Technical books on acoustics often assert that noise is in some way biologically coded - 'we' perceive certain sounds as noise because the vibrations are too close to the frequencies, rhythms, wavelengths of bodily functions. Others are noise because they are too alien. This is not totally false, but what is really at stake here are discourses which presume that there is an absolute, shared biology, layered with personal freedoms of judgement, feeling and so on. Such a stratification is also not false, but that does not make it natural, nor the specific layering a given: it makes an apparent end-result (or beginning-result), where there could simply be process [8].

If we are to listen to noise as music, noise designed as music, noise perhaps designed to stay noise, but to be heard in the conditions music is listened to, then something must give. Two possible models: firstly, learn to live with it - adopt an Adorno pattern (didactic) over a Hegel pattern (post-Hegelian, (un)phenomological), unwittingly championed by John Cage, and argue that we can, as result of listening to noise, rather than hearing it involuntarily, relearn how to approach the world and its cultural 'world' (of course, world and 'world' can be quickly reversed); second model - create a situation which exposes the 'noise-afflicted subject' to remain so - through an act of sovereignty (something in Bataille that seems to be mastery, but undoes itself) consign the subject and its supposedly subordinate vessel to chora-ness.

How to be a body without organs without being a fusion-loving hippie: after the schizo, paranoid, hysteric bodies, comes the masochist body: retrained and subjected as the last choice of the subject, the masochist body is "further" than the schizo body, leaking its internal organs, becoming pathway, becoming solid, becoming-becoming. The masochist body has the option of losing itself as organism through restraint, enclosure, containment (whilst also becoming someone else's body without organs, becoming body of the other): "it has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts and nose are sewn shut. It has itself strung up to stop the organs from working; flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin; sodomized, smothered, to make sure everything is sealed tight" [9]. As a result we have a version of 'the' body without organs: it "is what remains when everything is taken away. What you take away is, very specifically, is the [masochist] phantasy, the whole made up of significations and subjectifications" [10]. Except that not everything has been taken away - the ears remain open.[11] Is this so the masochist body can hear instructions? Is this because the body without organs is really about listening?[12] It is perhaps that the ears constitute 'an' organ that we cannot control, so to leave 'it' open is to close the possibility of control through closing - if the ears were closed, the masochist would again be in charge of the soundworld. The ears become wound.

A suspicion remains that the unclosed ears maintain a link to the world of sense - whilst the ears themselves might constitute a wound, it is an enabling wound, one that (like the pain now disallowed as warning signal) allows the possibility of processing the world into meaning. To block the ears would also instigate a possibility of self-awareness as organism, although a sense of panic, if it occurred, would be the undoing of this. Even so, the end-result, once we consider the ears as hearing device, whether open, closed, blocked, unblocked, the body without organs but with ears is a naturalised one, one that returns us to a primordial condition (even if a primordiality that was not primordial, but becomes that which is returned to as if it were primordial).

The body without organs whose ears are filled with noise, however, is more (or, more accurately, less) of a body without organs: the noise-filled ear is no longer capable of hearing the voice of reason, the warnings of danger, the patterning of sound we somehow have always come to believe constitute not-noise. The body without organs does not hear or listen to noise, but is (in) the hearing of noise that exceeds the body that first lost in the sound of its muffled breath, the movement of liquids and gases, the slight panic pulse.[13]

Deleuze and Guattari are right to note that the body without organs is about the failure to become: "There is no attaining the Body without Organs -- you cannot attain it, you never finish getting to it -- it's a limit."[14] The body without organs cannot become itself, or anything else, and the way in which this specifically cannot happen is through the multiple failure of hearing/ears: its mysterious amnesty in _A Thousand Plateaus_, its failure through noise to process sense, the failure to stop processing, the failure to return to the 'true' body, and the failure that is the return to the "true" body (in, for example heightened awareness of the body's function -- although even if this were possible, it would constitute a forcible intervention in the functioning of the body). The body without organs is the failure of completion, the failure of this failure (organ resistance). The failure is the process of becoming, and becoming-failed is the noise of the attempt to get to the body without organs - the supplemental 'place' where it cannot be, where only it 'is'.

Another story of the ear related by Kroker is one in which "the ear finally comes into its own. But not the old ear attached to a living head".[15] The ear moves into (non)being as a post-masochistic organ without a body. But as we have seen, also an organ without a body without organs.

Noise can be seen as structural: in the realm of law, of good citizenship, it is "undesired", or "excessive" sound.[16] In the realm of Law as that which operates rationality, noise is that which has always to be excluded -- the exclusion having always already been and (not) gone, in order that the Law exists. This seems to indicate noise as a category, like the sublime, of domesticated exclusion. But noise can be conceived of as process. For Russolo, "[the timbre of noise] is no longer an effect bound to the causes that produce it (motive energy, striking, friction through speed, bumping, and so on) owing to and inherent in the purpose of the machine or thing that makes the noise",[17] and if noise is process, is always a becoming-noise -- or, alternatively, (not) coming into (not) being as noise, this exclusion (what we take to be in the exclusion) is undone when noise 'is', as noise is the coming-undone of noise/organised sound. Most particularly when noise 'is' where it cannot be -- music.[18]

Noise also has to contain judgement: it is 'unwanted'. Can noise be wanted - clearly that would then define the noise in question as not-noise. If we are happy with tautology, we can stay there. Or - let us presume that noise is always unwanted as a function of wanting (desire, if you must) - it might even be "what you did not know you wanted" -- as suggested by Attali, when he writes that new music always emerges as noise in what is to become "the old order": "despite the death it contains, noise carries order within itself; it carries new information";[19] as of course suggested by that prime mover of de- and re- territorialisation, the 'capitalist machine'. The unwanted is not a function of some lack-oriented mysticism about desire, but the actuality of wanting, once removed from subject/object control. More simply, though, what if you actually do want to hear something that is noise - in the shape of unorganised, unpredictable, violent (sometimes in terms of volume) sound? Attali makes the case that 'music' is heading toward noise, in the form of unavoidable background music[20] and in its increased standardisation, where "it is trapped in identity and will dissolve into noise".[21] The judgement 'I want to listen to noise' is a deterritorialised one - it is occurring without the subject intervening. Nonetheless, it might be the sign of the dying Subject grasping for some form of Authentic Existence before disappearing (accompanying the world of "performance art" into a world of hyper-simulated sacrifice).[22]

Music, according to Attali, is "the organization of noise".[23] Noise has an existence outside of our conscious control, which is partly natural, partly social environmental: "life is full of noise and [...] death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, noise of beast".[24] Life, then, is rationalised, brought into line, and rigorously limited. A general economy of sacrifice, murder, waste is lost, in music, "originating in ritual murder of which it is the simulacrum".[25] Attali, however, cannot go so far as to see that noise cannot be natural -- that it is the equivalent of the Nature left behind at the signing of the social contract -- only coming into (not) being as retrospective, excluded and forbidden. He clearly states that noise is that which is to be excluded, but not that the endless and impossible exclusion is where noise 'is' -- crossing and not crossing the line that is (not) there, as with Foucault's transgression line. Why is death silent? At a literal level it is noisy -- organs becoming extinct, collapsing, expanding, rotting -- an endless carnival even before the arrival of other creatures. Death is silent in the sense of the subject not being there to hear it. Is this what occurs in Cage's silences? Is the hearing subject absented, rather than, as Cage wished, brought forcibly into the presence of sounds usually unheard?[26] Silence, however, is structurally speaking, death - the death of the system of organised sound, priority of voice, meaning, music.[27] The death that is fully recognised by the system that excludes it. Silence, unlike noise, does structure, or let come into structure, systems of meaning. Noise is too much, is excess as the working of excess (not just the excessive product).

Noise is excluded for being too natural, but also for being unnatural. Rupert Taylor, in a burst of retrospective utopianism, asserts that "at the same time man was learning to create pleasurable stimuli to his sense of hearing, in other words to create music, he was beginning to pollute his surroundings and blunt his hearing by making more and more loud and unpleasant crashes and bangs, grindings and rumbles" (The Law Relating to Noise, 16). Much, maybe all considerations in terms of noise as a social issue presume noise is that which is to be reduced (not wrongly, but...) -- so that we can return to what is best for us ("like water and air pollution, most noise is the result of the decision for technological progress at the expense of the human environment".[28, 29] The "human environment", endlessly stabilised, is not nature, however, and is not to contain silence. In fact, contain silence is precisely what it does, offering endless background noise (sometimes in the form of music) in order to actively silence, argues Attali.[30]

III. Endless Oscillation of the Material
----------------------------------------

Merzbow (aka Masami Akita) plays the double game of ambience Attali identifies: omnipresent sound, becoming noise; noise becoming background. Merzbow music consists of the debris of music, of sound: pulses, feedback, hisses, whirs, blasts, distortions, pure tones, shrieks, machine noise -- all played extremely loud.[31] But this music is noise "all the way down" -- there is no space for recognisably musical sounds to be overlaid with distortions (as in 1980s music in the wake of punk), just combinations of noises, that do not settle into a mantric pulse, or continual explosion ("not music at all, but rather the intensive expenditure of sound and silence").[32] The listener struggles to find a way through, in or above the noise music but gives up at a certain point: rhythms are to be found, frequencies to be followed -- it is not just random, but - eventually "the listener" is pulverised into believing there is a link. Noise music becomes ambience not as you learn how to listen, or when you accept its refusal to settle, but when you are no longer in a position to accept or deny. Perhaps the "experienced listener" can manage whole albums, concerts -- Merzbow has the answer in the shape of the 50CD Merzbox. The possibility of mastery, of "learning to hear anew" etc. -- held out as if possible -- endlessly broken (to keep the possibility open as indefinite promise) by alteration, by blurring of the strata of sound, is what feeds the continual excess of noise music. Noise music is the endless sacrifice of art music didacticism and of restricted economy "noise" (metal, hardcore of all types).[33]

It seems like a claim could be made for Merzbow to be the avant-garde, perpetually renewing the art, moving the boundaries etc., but actually noise music inhabits the failure of the avant-garde to be, to come to be. Schwitters wanted his Merz to redefine our relation to the material, to value, to what art could be. This then is brought to the interior, and shores up the monument of art. Merzbow does not want to live in a house full of crap, or outside it, neither does it want to live in a new crappy house: it wants to knock down the house it lives in, to live in it. Even this is too much, though: Merzbow actually wants to find a rundown house made up of broken stuff, and break it. Over and over.

The reason Merzbow cannot be avant-garde (or is the avant-garde that cannot be: i.e., the avant-garde) is that the breaking is static: like Paul Virilio's speed, Merzbow's destruction of music attains a point of stillness, one composed of total movement (and like Nietzsche's "moment" of eternal return). The world of 'the now', this now, always now, comes together as interface, as the non-place of speed as non-movement.[34] This in turn signals the possibility of "crash music",[35] emerging at a new stage of hearing (generally neglected with the presumption that the digital world is one of images alone), such that we can now take noise/"crash music" to be "so seductive because of its fascinating logic of an always promised imminent reversibility: pure ecstasy/pure catastrophe".[36] This imminent reversibility, occurs as solid, as immanence.

Merzbow eludes Adorno's critique of aleatory music (whilst wilfully staying within its purview): "today's artists would rather do away with unity altogether, producing open, unfinished works, or so they think. The problem is that in planning openness they necessarily impart another kind of unity unbeknown to themselves".[37] The apparent aleatorics of noise signal an endless closing, a ceasing filling, but always, at any one time, ceaseless. Noise music (which is admittedly not the same as Adorno's actual target -- the music of Cage or those who followed in the 1960s and 1970s, but bearing in mind his even stronger 'critique' of jazz, I think we might be able to infer a line of tech flight to noise music), seems to fall into Adorno's trap: in terms of the title which takes on an increased significance, as we search to impose some form of sense, even if we do not necessarily seek to do this. Not having any titles would be just as caught within the loop: the subject now the ineffable abstraction of sound, noise, music etc., or as with some abstract painting, the subject becomes the Subject, working itself through on the canvas. The title (in Merzbow's music) sets up a process wherein it cannot become the subject of the music: there is no metonymy, mimesis, metaphor to be had - and yet, the title makes it ~as if~ such things were possible - as with the structure of the 'pieces' (Akita: "When I use words, say album titles, they are not chosen to convey any meanings. They are merely selected to mean nothing".[38]

With this in mind, Merzbow's Antimonument (1991) can be seen as a mission statement -- both for and against Schwitters, Merzbow attacks the solidity of Hegelianised Western culture, through five tracks of seemingly arbitrary lengths, made up of arbitrarily selected sounds, moving along but not. In fact, Antimonument is quite 'readable' - centred on arrhythmic, treated percussion: the monument has yet to be left behind -- but this is still music with the music taken out - hardly any attack in the percussive sounds, distortion, and unpredictable 'interruptions' by hisses, static and so on constituting the material proper. Akita specifies that the reference to the Merzbau is one of decreasing relevance: "the name is only important to my early work, which I thought related to the concept of Merzbau".[39, 40] Antimonument is Akita leaving the building. The building, the monument that is progressively deserted in Antimonument, as the tracks grow sparser, is a double one: it is the leaving of a traditional Japanese music (that Merzbow never completes -- "Japanese sounds and instruments are used but their character is often purposely extinguished in the mix",[41]), and also the leaving of the Western monument. Why should he even be near this, except in a Western-centred model? Because philosophically, musically, politically and economically, Japan has not stayed outside the Western monument. This despite a certain exoticist attribution of lack of meaning, of, therefore, an atheoretical purity -- "Japanese artists use Noise simply as cathartic release without the philosophical underpinnings" [42] -- emptying the space to fill it, if not with Western meaning, then with Western emptiness. Masami Akita is interested in philosophy: in Eastern: "Japanese Noise relishes the ecstasy of sound itself and the concepts come from the sound. It is a tradition of eastern philosophy to base theory on real experience" [43], and in Western: in the form of explicit references to contemporary theory (Derrida, Foucault, and Bataille, whose use is contemporary), and implicit ones: "noise is the nomadic producer of difference" [44].

In today's restricted (but generalised) music economy, we have had the ludicrous 'world music', and also the real world music Attali hints at: ambient pap. Alongside these particular versions, is another (anti)global music: Japanese noise music: a refusal through over-acceptance of Western genre, such that genre does not work: hence Japanese noise music's different take on violence and sound, away from heroic (tragic) mastery of or submission to "the horror, pain etc., of the world" (this despite the importance of bondage as a reference for Masami Akita). Against generic noise, but with the noise of genre.

There is a sense of progression in Merzbow's oeuvre, as the materials alter, and the recording capacities of CD technology allow a greater range of frequencies to seep in. David Keenan argues that Noisembryo (1994) "is the quintessential Merzbow release"[45] due to its power, volume, and force - this, then is what had been aimed at all along, in the teleological version. Noise, however, does not necessarily have anything to do with these factors, and their having an apotheosis. The "sheer noise" of the mid 1990s releases could be described as a different sort of zenith in terms of the fact that there just is 'more'. Instead of a Hegelian progress, a Sadean, additive process. This 'more' has to be more than more; otherwise we are just in the realm of groups such as Whitehouse, whose purpose often seems to be to attain a position of mastery over noise.[46] This more than more is, perhaps inevitably, a less: Merzbow can never get to the zenith, because Merzbow's music is doomed to fall: it is always open to assimilation as music -- or, it is not assimilable, and therefore it claims transcendence. Or, in some notional noise/music dialectic, in being on the limit, it fails to resolve, and fails to fail - because it is noise music, it cannot belong, dwell. Instead it is dwelling, part of a plateau, rhizome etc., with 'the listener', noise as becoming-noise, as well as becoming-music.

Noisembryo opens with a blast of noise that endlessly mutates across the album, interrupted by (the noise of?) silence three times. Always differentiated, this is noise that does not settle, where even the volume -- or mass of sound -- cannot be perceived as consistent as the pitches of the specific strata are continually shifting, whilst not at any one time covering the whole range. This album is noise as the immanence beyond, beneath, above the noise/music divide: noise as the emptying immanence.

It might seem that some form of communing, however perverse, might be possible. If so, it is that community which is not realisable, the one 'present' in Bataillean sacrifice -- Thacker notes that in Music for Bondage Performance (1991) we see "the body of music filled with excess and volume, presented as the tension-filled inability of excess to fulfil itself",[47] and this "body of music "is" the body of listener, the music as material, the hearing as solid, and the un-communion of these, all at once. Thacker further claims that noise is the accursed share of the sound worlds, and therefore itself in the position of that which is to be sacrificed.[48]

But it is Bataille's conception of immanence that is of interest here, as its dividing off of animal from human stands in parallel to that of noise and music, with the former term the always (to be) excluded that can return, but which 'we' cannot be. Bataille suggests that the animal is like "water in water",[49] which seems to be what is happening if immersed in noise, if liable to suggest some kind of sacrificial wholeness, a form of rescue.[50] Japanese noise will not get us there, any more than sacrifice. Immanence is not only what is beyond (performative negativities like object, nature, the other) but what is (not) beyond: that which is the beyond of the beyond, only insofar as there is no such place to be.

Bataille: "I am able to say that the animal world is that of immanence and immediacy, for that world, which is closed to us, is so to the extent that we cannot discern in it an ability to transcend itself. [...] It is only within the limits of the human that the transcendence of things in relation to consciousness (or of consciousness in relation to things) is manifested."[51]

There is no place for the object or the subject's transcendence, coming to be, getting beyond that coming to be in knowing about it, or being known, when immanence is the field. The 'consciously' constructed sound of Noisembryo moves into the smooth space of immanence as it eludes the knowable world of other noise (of noise 'in the world'), which is held at a distance. This set of sounds brings the distance near, and this just as much when blasts of 'different coloured' noises slide across each other, a third of the way into "Part Two" as when 'the' noise falls away into a distorted drone halfway into "Part Three". Noise as event, as excess of eventness, because unlike late serialism, it does not leave gaps peppered with inane atonalities. It is gap, non-tonality.

For Deleuze and Guattari, the non-place of the body without organs is (in) immanence, and is itself (as immanence) the non-place of desire.[52] However, they do not see any totally free music being the way, as "a material that is too rich remains too &..39;territorialized'"[53] -- too diffuse, too noisy. Such emphasis on getting outside music has held us back/in, as "people often have too much of a tendency to reterritorialize on the child, the mad, noise".[54] We are back once more with Deleuze and Guattari's still open ears: open but not too open (not open enough?). These are ears that can learn, that can discern patterns, and the undoing of patterns, not ears that might be held forcibly open.[55]

What happens when you hit something like ultimate noise (it cannot be described as pure)? Where is there to go? In order for it to always (fail to) be ultimate, it must go nowhere, but go it must, dromological. Before the sovereignty of Merzbox (which is largely older materials in any case), comes Pulse Demon (1995). The title obliges an attribution of purpose: we know what Merzbow is up to, maybe he is becoming increasingly Hegelian, and attempting to map all noise, with this being his exploration of 'the pulse'. I suspect there are no more or less pulse actions in this album than any other mid 1990s Merzbow albums.[56] What is indicated is the arbitrariness of signification, an arbitrariness which serves to highlight another difference between Merzbow and Western 'avant-garde' music: randomness, as Deleuze suspects, is not really very interesting, but arbitrariness - chance as destiny, read as if there were variation (or indeed as if there were not) - carries noise as process, as that which intervenes 'between' noise and organised sound. Pulse Demon is undeniably 'organised sound' - it has differentiated tracks, titles for these, and seemingly significant times: we might get the impression that if all this noise has been split into 6.42 ("Woodpecker no.1"), or 24.53 ("Worms Plastic Earthbound"), that the duration might be significant. But many (possibly all) Merzbow 'pieces' of this period are cut, not ended. Their beginning is often cut, so there will never be a sense of attack -- we are immediately in the realm of distortion, hiss, pulse, squawks etc., -- of the effects of actions, not the direct products -- noise all the way down. The organisational frame of the album undoes the possibility of this being 'pure noise' or even an exploration of duration (very few Merzbow albums consist only of one track). Instead we are in the curious position of listening as if it were noise (i.e. because framed as if it were music). Any settling into listening to this 'stuff' as if it really were either noise or music is very much the 'consolation' Nietzsche hints at in The Birth of Tragedy as being our way of minimising the otherness of sounds presented in a musical frame.[57] Such a 'consolation' is not an individual failing, but a systemic success of failure to fail.

IV. Is Nothing not Enough?
--------------------------

Once again, and still: what if we do not want the consolation (consolation of noise being music really; of noise being natural; of noise being an escape, a line of flight that might go somewhere; of noise being a ruse of power)? Noise can perhaps never escape (it might be the 'as if' escape were possible), as it comes in with voice, language and meaning.[58] Derrida asks of philosophy (here, as often, standing for sense, rationality, discourse, (search for) truth, etc.) whether it can exceed itself: "can one violently penetrate philosophy's field of listening without its immediately -- even pretending in advance, by hearing what is said of it, by decoding the statement -- making the penetration resonate within itself [...]?" ("Tympan", xii). Derrida's answer is, as always, that the outside of philosophy (or of organised sound as philosophy) is to be found at work in/on/as the inside of philosophy - with the inside being the outside of the outside, and the process that (never fully) establishes the divide. Zarathustra's hammer instead is the condition of its other, and the othering between Same and Other (xii-xiii), such that we should be interested in the limit itself, and not what is beyond it, the marginality of the margin itself, and so on. Japanese noise might be such a negotiation of the limit, but one that only works as such because it declares itself outside, is the declaration, the announcing of outside. The 'real' noise in noise music is this (not) crossing of the line that is (not) there: noise is not the other of the other that equals the same, but the other of the other as non-line, as what cannot be the same and cannot inhabit otherness. Where Derrida is outflanked by Merzbow is that Derrida says you cannot get outside, you cannot consciously undo philosophy with a hammer, therefore you should not do it -- instead you should not attack directly (xv); should take an interest in "timbre, style, and signature [as they] are the same obliterating division of the proper" (xix). Why not do it? Why not do it, knowing it cannot be done, that your noise is fatally compromised, part of failure?[59] Merzbow is the getting outside that is not the completion of a new "inside", but an endless outside, fated to be inside only to fail to ~ever be~ because of this arbitrary and perverse relation to the inside (of organised sound). Where Derrida says "no", Merzbow is an immanent "yes".

Notes
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[1] Douglas Kahn , Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), p. 25.

[2] Ibid., p. 20.

[3] Ibid., p. 48.

[4] Ibid., p. 45.

[5] European Commission Report: Position Paper on European Union Noise Indicators (Luxembourg: European Communities, 2000), p. 71.

[6] C.S. Kerse, The Law Relating to Noise (London: Oyez, 1975), p. 8. Rupert Taylor also describes noise as "unwanted sound" (Noise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 22).

[7] Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 30. Originally written in 1977, this text remains vital in assessments of freedom, control, subversion, radicality, recuperation etc. in terms of human-produced sound. The argument here that "Japanese noise" is that which specifically exceeds his argument should in no way be taken as criticism of Attali. One criticism that could be made of Attali is that he presumes that music has a single origin/reason/purpose. Music could be said to be always already plural. Such would be the argument of Philip V. Bohlman's "Ontologies of Music", in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17-34 -- even if this article provides nothing in the way of ontology, as understood since phenomenology.

[8] Arthur Kroker: "Hearing has always been alchemical, a violent zone where sound waves mutate into a sedimentary layer of cultural meanings, where historical referents secrete into contemporary states of subjectivity, and where there is no stability, only an aural logic of imminent reversibility" (Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music, Electric Flesh (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). The alchemy is one the body, the ears, the sound, noise, codings, listening practices etc. and cannot be definitively described or known, except as a statement about how a particular society, at a particular time, seeks to encode, to end transformations.

[9] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 150.

[10] Ibid., p. 151 (translation modified).

[11] The body of organs, of identity (not forgetting that organs without a body might be more dangerous still) has privileged the eye, and in contemporary culture, makes this privileging a site of control: "the eye is a masochistic orifice in the age of panoptic power, capable of endless discipline and of being seduced beyond bodily subjectivity into a floating free fall within the society of the spectacle", leaving the ear repressed, except in terms of receiving "spectacular" sound (muzak, MTV) (Kroker, Spasm, 49). The body without organs, though, would not free us from this, but drive us further in, playing masochism beyond jouissance. "Freeing" the ear would not liberate us, either. Rather, the ear has to become masochistic, in the Deleuzian sense (see "Coldness and Cruelty" in Masochism (New York: Zone, 1994), 9-138) instead of being forced to submit. It must then renounce both control and contract. There is, of course, another story of the eye -- Bataille's, followed up by Foucault, in which the upturned eye, removed, trans(un)figured, is the site of the loss of meaning. Eugene Thacker assimilates this story with noise music: "the visuality of Bataille transgressing itself is analogous to the music of noise" ("Bataille/Body/ Noise: Notes Toward a Techno-Erotics", (63), in Brett Woodward (ed.), Merzbook: The Pleasuredome of Noise (Melbourne, Cologne: Extreme, 1999), 57-65). The comparison is perhaps too easy as the ear does not have the status of the eye, nor is music of noise in itself capable of the reversibility of the eye, which seeks to be both medium and control of media.

[12] Derrida seems to "prefigure" this in writing that "to forget it [the role of the ear, and of listening] - and in so doing to take shelter in the most familial of dwellings - is to cry out for end of organs, of others" "Tympan", (Margins of Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), ix-xxix), xvii. This occurs because the ear allows hearing of one's own self and voice, leading to the non-conception (as unproblematised) of self-presence or "absolute properness" (ibid.). Derrida, however, in turn, has not questioned whether an ear can be less than open or closed, and could in fact be filled. See also Hegel, making essentially the same point: "hearing [...], like sight, is one of the theoretical and not practical senses, and it is still more ideal than sight", as it gets the subject to "the first and more ideal breath of the soul" (Aesthetics, Vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 890).

[13] C.S. Kerse, citing Samuel Rosen, notes that "at an unexpected or unwanted noise, the pupils dilate, the skin pales, mucous membranes dry; there are intestinal spasms and the adrenals explode secretions. The biological organism, in a word, is disturbed" (The Law Relating to Noise, 7)

[14] Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 150.

[15] Kroker, op. cit., p. 47.

[16] Kerse, op. cit., p. 3.

[17] Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon, 1986), p. 87.

[18] Noise is not differance - it is an emptier of links, relations, processes, not that which holds them mysteriously together. It is Bataille's "NOTHING", not the nothing that is the opposite of something, or the reason why there might be something instead of nothing. It is the thing which stops there having been a reason for something over nothing.

[19] Attali, op. cit., p. 33.

[20] Op. cit., pp. 111-12.

[21] Op. cit., p. 45.

[22] The dying subject is not one reaching out for the answer, but reaching into its disappearance in noise. For Nietzsche, "the Dionysiac, with its primal pleasure experienced in pain, is the common womb of music and the tragic myth" (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (London: Penguin, 1993), 115). In looking at tragedy, he writes, we seek to go beyond its pain, and, similarly "with reference to artistically applied dissonance [...] we want to hear and long to go beyond hearing" (ibid.). Rather than take this as the suggestion we might learn from what is difficult, painful, etc., we could take this as stating the case for not going beyond noise: the act of listening to noise is one of supplementarity: the beyond of noise (initially music)is the precondition for listening to noise, so as to get to "the beyond of noise" (which now is that there is only noise, and that the beyond of noise is what can never have been attained). In listening to noise, though, the loss is played over again always for the first time, as opposed to being the excluded loss of foundation (the "birth of sense"...).

[23] Attali, op. cit., p. 4.

[24] Op. cit., p. 3.

[25] Op. cit., p. 4.

[26] Michael Nyman notes that Cage discovers the impossibility of silence on a visit to Harvard's anechoic chamber, where he still hears his own body (Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 25-6. Cage's famous 4'33" "is a demonstration of the non-existence of silence" p. 26.

[27] This has led many others, as well as Attali, to assert that noise is life, or nearer to life's "real processes". Russolo states that "noise [...] has the power of immediately recalling life itself" (The Art of Noises, 27). This, coming as it does from the "pioneer" of noise in/as music, could be taken not as a simple naturalism, but as a parallel with "bare" or "mere" life (Benjamin, Agamben). Noise for Russolo also signals the life that had already moved on from nature, that is the excluding of nature - i.e. the city. Masami Akita (Merzbow) concurs: "noise is one of the most primitive music forms in the modern city" (in Woodward (ed.), Merzbook, 11). Is this to naturalise noise? Only before we think about music: for noise to be some sort of fundamental music demonstrates Akita's awareness that the noise of the city comes as a result of organisation, of power systems, of restricted economies of signification.

[28] Kearse, op. cit., p. 1.

[29] Adorno claims aeroplane noise ruins walks in the forest (Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 311) -- noise is wrong because not part of true nature, but what Adorno is also claiming ("despite himself") is that noise is also ruinous of nature as acculturated Nature - as it is an uncontrolled incursion into a humanised sphere, immanence in the subject/object field. Hegel argues that to overcome this "problem", music must moderate "the natural": "the notes [are] not to be a purely natural shriek of feeling but the developed and artistic expression of it" (Aesthetics, vol II, 910) - so music is neither too natural nor unnatural (it is to express what is now left behind as natural).

[30] Attali, op. cit., p. 20 and passim.

[31] Amplification - the technological means for producing noise as volume of sound, as well as feedback systems (if not the only means) is an essential part of the development of noise music, which at the risk of being slightly determinist, arises (in the Japan of the early 1970s) out of the combination of improvised music in the form of free jazz, and the improvised rock of a similar period, which relies for its effect, on the power of amplification, the distortions of feedback. Douglas Kahn , dealing with experiments with noise and sound, signals the importance of technological developments in the alterations in ways of thinking sound, noise, music (see Noise Water Meat, 2-13 and passim).

[32] Thacker, op. cit., p. 63.

[33] Noise music is also the sacrifice of the "music business", the rendering of it as general, rather than restricted economy, through its disruptive methods of releasing recordings on many labels, in limited and peculiar editions, direct sales. Woodward notes "the creation and production of such items intentionally subverts late capitalism's notions of the marketplace, the performer/audience relationship and entertainment commodity production and distribution" ("A Machinic Scream" (33), in Merzbook, 33-6). Before we get carried away with some postmodernistic praise for the artisanal symbiosis between musician and listener, it is worth noting that concerts are infrequent, and a literal distance maintained, a distance allowed by the very processes of subverting "late capitalism". This is a deterritorialisation that stays one -- i.e. carries no autonomous radicality.

[34] See Virilio, The Lost Dimension (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991).

[35] Kroker, op. cit., p. 54.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Adorno, op. cit., p. 204.

[38] Akita in _Merzbook_, p. 40.

[39] Akita cf. Edwin Pouncy, "Consumed by Noise", The Wire, vol. 198 (2000), p. 29.

[40] Op. cit., pp. 26-32. This interview and overview is a solid introduction to Merzbow, whilst being caught up with the "musicality of the noise". Pouncey stresses the learning experience, with statements such as "when the listener has attuned his or her hearing perspective" (26), "the fact is that to understand, enjoy and eventually reach noise nirvana through Masami Akita's work, you have to listen to a hell of a lot of it" (27). These sentiments are echoed by David Keenan's top ten Merzbow albums (The Wire, vol 198, 32-3).

[41] Akita, in Woodward, op. cit., p. 11.

[42] Woodward, op. cit., pp. 14, 12-15.

[43] Akita, in Merzbook, op. cit., p. 23.

[44] Op. cit., p. 9 and elsewhere, as the contributors love repeating it.

[45] The Wire, Vol. 198, p. 33.

[46] See for example Never Forget Death (1992), which warns that "Torture Chamber" (a track of mounting "white noise") should not be played excessively loud -- i.e. because it is inherently loud.

[47] "Bataille/Body/ Noise: Notes Toward a Techno-Erotics", op. cit., p. 58.

[48] Op. cit., p. 59.

[49] Theory of Religion, (New York: Zone, 1989), p. 23.

[50] Op. cit.

[51] Op. cit., pp. 23-24.

[52] Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 154.

[53] Op. cit., p. 344.

[54] Ibid.

[55] To be fair to Deleuze and Guattari, Japanese noise was far from a breakthrough in 1980, although nearly all of today's "recognised practitioners" were active then. Their unfortunate espousal of the "influential" Varese is just one example of why caution should be taken with imagining Deleuze and Guattari as signposts for the future. In one sense this lack of awareness of the contemporary is itself contemporary -- not in terms of some sort of "dumbing down", but just in terms of the retro-future we seem to inhabit in terms of future music (for example in The Matrix, whose future remains 1985).

[56] If this seems a very specific dating, it nonetheless applies to perhaps 20 albums. Merzbow's output is immense: in addition to the 50 contained in Merzbox, there are another 150 recordings.

[57] Nietzsche suggests that if music can rediscover its links to the emptiness that is "true reality, through an appreciation of every "phenomenon", then we will experience some kind of catharsis (see 94, in particular). In the light of the later preface, however, where "perhaps as laughers you will consign all metaphysical consolations to the devil -- and metaphysics in front of the rest!" (12), much of the main text suggests a proto-Bataillean recognition of a fearful, sacrificial, dangerous general economy of "ugly" sound, brought inevitably into a restricted economy where we "get something from it". See for example 83-4, where "consolation" with regard to the ineffability of things is one of "three levels of illusion" (84), not the hidden truth, or goal. The inevitability of the restricted economy can be seen in the inevitable influence of Apollo (rationality, wisdom, accumulation of knowledge): "the Apolline lifts man out of his orgiastic self-destruction, and deceives him about the universality of the Dionysiac event, deluding him into the idea that he can see only a single image of the world" (102).

[58] This despite the ineffability claimed for noise (and claimed throughout history for "that which goes beyond language" - music, the image, the world, gods, etc). Woodward's version of this: "It's almost the inability to definitively describe Merzbow's music with the limitations of the written word that is the testament to its thrill and power, intricacy and convolution" ("The Nomadic Producer of Difference", in Merzbook, 9).

[59] We can compare Derrida's deconstructing binaries with those Attali establishes through noise and music, as in the following: "Music responds to the terror of noise, recreating differences between sounds and repressing the tragic dimension of dissonance - just as sacrifice responds to the terror of violence. Music has been, from its origin, a simulacrum of the monopolization of the power to kill, a simulacrum of ritual murder" (Noise, 28). Noise and music blur when sacrifice is at issue, when music is excessive and essentially ritual, such that "music functions like sacrifice; listening to noise is a little like being killed" (ibid.).

Articles: a097
Date Published: 11/8/2001
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=314
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Editors

The Aesthetics of Noise

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 04:12:59 GMT

I do not agree with all the conclusions reached below
but it was an interesting read

Noise can blow your head out. Noise is rage. Noise is ecstatic. Noise is psychedelic. Noise is often on the edge between annoyance and bliss. Noises are many things. Noise is a difficult concept to deal with.
Some would say that it is no longer meaningful to talk about noise as something special, since we have finally reached a state in which all sounds are equal. That may be so for certain avant-garde artists and advanced listeners, but I will assert that we still hear a difference between noise and more traditional musical sounds. Noises are the sounds which used to be denounced as non-musical. To include noise in music thus still has an effect and bears a certain aesthetic power. That power is the topic of this essay. To give an exhaustive explanation of it, though, is not only beyond the limits of an essay, but seems to be fundamentally impossible due to the evasiveness of the matter.1 There is a constant discrepancy between the essentially indescribable object and the attempt to verbalize and understand it. It is my hope that the following reflections are nevertheless able to sketch out an approach to understanding the important part noise plays in the music of today.

After defining noise and giving a brief history of noise in music, I will take a closer look at Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Merzbow and Curd Duca as four very different aesthetic approaches to noise. Ranging from aggressive ecstasy to soft intimacy, from melodic sweetness to abstract hard-core noise, from the guitar to the computer, these examples serve to indicate the variety of noise in both rock music and electronica. Reflecting these in a broader perspective I will then turn to philosophical concepts such as the sublime, the Dionysian, multiplicity, and the abject.

What is noise?
Etymologically, the term "noise" in different Western languages (stj, bruit, Gerusch, larm etc.) refers to states of aggression, alarm and tension and to powerful sound phenomena in nature such as storm, thunder and the roaring sea. It is worth noting in particular that the word "noise" comes from Greek nausea, referring not only to the roaring sea, but also to seasickness, and that the German Gerusch is derived from rauschen (the sough of the wind), related to Rausch (ecstasy, intoxication), thus pointing towards some of the aesthetic, bodily effects of noise in music.
A single definition of noise is not possible; instead I will provide three basic definitions: an acoustic, a communicative and a subjective definition.

A. Acoustic noise
In the field of acoustics the concept of noise is in principle purely physically defined. Noises are sounds that are impure and irregular, neither tones nor rhythm - roaring, pealing, blurry sounds with a lot of simultaneous frequencies, as opposed to a rounded sound with a basic frequency and its related overtones. To name different kinds of noise, synaesthetic metaphors are derived from the spectrum of color so that 'white noise' is a signal ideally containing all of the audible frequencies at the same time, like an untuned radio. A signal in which certain frequencies are preferred to others is thus called "colored noise," ranging from "violet noise" (a bias on the high frequencies) to "purple noise" (a bias on the low frequencies).

B. Communicative noise
In communication theory, noise is that which distorts the signal on its way from transmitter to recipient. There will always be an element of distortion, either externally or internally, coming from the medium itself. In music noise is often originally a malfunction in the instruments or electronics (a disturbance of the clear signal), which is then reversed into a positive effect. The distortion effect of the electric guitar, for instance, which is now ubiquitous, was originally an overload of the amplifier, causing it to fray the sound. In the early sixties, guitarists began to deliberately construct this distortion by fiddling with the amplifiers, and soon the industry marketed pedals with names like "fuzztone", "overdrive", and "distortion" as an easy way to obtain the same effect.
In the same way electronica artists work with different sorts of overloads of the devices, or they deliberately induce errors with unpredictable results. One of the methods is giving the midi too many signals for it to handle, resulting in an uncontrollable musical output. Another technique is the obvious one of creating distortion by overloading a digital amplifier.
When you reverse a disturbance into a part of the music itself, it is not smoothly integrated but infuses the music with a tension. There is still a play on the formerly negative relation between noise and signal when a noise is legitimated. This tension is an important part of the musical power of noise.

C. Subjective noise
"Unpleasant sounds" this is the common and colloquial, but also the most intricate, meaning of noise. And it is obviously a subjective definition. There are very few general rules as to which sounds are unpleasant (the higher the frequency and the louder the sound, the more unpleasant it feels); it is to a great extent a matter of personal idiosyncrasy and cultural-historical situation.
An important factor in coming to dislike certain sounds is the extent to which they are considered meaningful. The noise of the roaring sea, for example, is not far from white radio noise, but is nonetheless not considered unpleasant and irritating. We still seek meaning in nature and therefore the roaring of the sea is a blissful sound, whereas radio noise (even if we were to hear it as indistinguishable from the sea) is normally considered a disturbance. Artists, who deal with noise in their music, as well as their audience, have a different approach to white noise, no longer considering it a nuisance.
One might conclude from this that the subjective definition is not relevant to the aesthetic use of noise in music. But, as I have already suggested, that would be a hasty dismissal of the important tension you get from infusing the formerly negative. To reach a point where a harsh, white noise is not considered unpleasant demands a training of the senses to the point of being familiar with this expansion of musical sounds. Reaching that point, noise will still contain a certain power due to the tension of listening to what used to be dismissed as repulsive (cf. below on the abjective character of noise).

The origin of music was in principle a process of purifying certain sounds by filtering out the irregular sounds, the noise. The church music of the Middle Ages was an extreme in this respect, allowing only the pure sound of the male voice and considering the interval of the third (today essentially consonant) a dissonance. The classical, Western tradition has (generally speaking) fostered instruments of pure sounds and maintained the exclusion of the impure, with some exceptions for dramatic effects (thunder, canons etc.). During the 19th century music became increasingly complex and dramatic, and at the same time the orchestra began to include more percussion instruments that were considered noisy. They were nevertheless far from what is today considered noise.
The first composer to consciously operate with noise as music was the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, writing the manifesto "The Art of Noise" in 1913. He constructed the so-called "intonarumori" (noise intonators) and composed a few works for these machines. They were quite primitive, each instrument making a single sound when turning a handle, and the music still had a residue of the mimetic, illustrative function. But the idea of allowing all sounds to be music was a crucial turning point.
Edgar Varse and John Cage both started from that point. For Varse, the important thing was to expand the possibilities of music within the tradition of an autonomous artwork, i.e. including new sounds, formerly rendered non-musical, now without their illustrative effect. He tried to emancipate noise from its mimetic function, abstracting it as purely aesthetic in works like Ionisation (1931), where he used sirens because of their glissando-possibilities rather than alluding to an emergency. By shifting the focus from the notes to the sound, by seeing music as layered, organized sound rather than melodic-harmonic development and by experimenting with electronic instruments, Varse is the probably most important pioneer of electronic music.
John Cage had similar visions, developing from an expansion of musical sounds in his invention of the prepared piano to the postwar philosophy that all music is just sound, and hence that all sound is music. He wanted to open our ears to all the sounds that surround us, emancipating all noises. This vision is still a long way from fulfillment.

After the Second World War musique concrte evolved in France, using tape technology to make music of found sounds. Pioneers were Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Pure electronic music was made possible by the mid-fifties, centered around the Cologne studio with composers like Gottfried Michael Knig, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyrgy Ligeti. The inclusion of electronic noise and a distinction between various noise qualities was an integral part of this period. Since then, numerous composers have worked with acoustic as well as electronic noise.

Rock music and guitar noise
Noise in rock music is centered on two effects, both connected to the electric guitar and developed in the sixties: feedback and distortion. Feedback is the back-coupling of the sound when the small pick-ups on the guitar react to the sound from the amplifier, i.e. the sound they themselves transmit. Distortion is the fraying of the guitar sound originally produced by amplifier overload, now normally by pedals.
The deliberate use of these effects can be traced back to Link Wray's "Rumble" (1958), but it was garage bands like The Kingsmen, The Kinks and especially The Who, who made it an integral part of their sound. The great innovator, however, was undoubtedly Jimi Hendrix, who constructed a whole catalogue of noise effects, using them with virtuosity in his blues-inspired rock compositions.
Aesthetically, however, the influence on noise rock came not from Hendrix, but rather The Velvet Underground, with their minimal, lo-fi, sinister music and disillusioned texts. On tracks like "European Son" and "Sister Ray," the noise is
alarming in ways that has made Velvet Underground a reference point for all noise rock.
In the 70s The Stooges continued the noisy garage tradition, combining it with free jazz elements, and paving the way for the punk rock movement. Lou Reed made his outstanding concept album Metal Machine Music (1975) four vinyl sides of sheer guitar noise and nothing else, made partly as a provocation directed at the record company, the record has gained a reputation as a place for weird, noisy beauty. I will also mention Pere Ubu's legendary first single "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" (1975), one of the most disturbing pieces of rock music ever made, and the provocative Throbbing Gristle debut 2nd Annual Report (1977).
The term "noise rock" (in Danish: stjrock) denotes a part of the post-punk scene rising from the ashes of punk in the late 70s. The use of guitar noise becomes a characteristic feature for a lot of bands, exploring its possibilities further. Post-punk is characterized by a certain preoccupation with the sinister, melancholy, pain, fear, death, excess, perversion in short, what the philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) has called "the heterogeneous". This term denotes that which does not fit into the normal and rational in modern society, that which cannot be subjugated by the public utility or profit. Post-punk thus tries to distance itself from the smoothness and cheerfulness of pop, though mostly without discarding its melodic qualities.
One of the important ways to achieve this is by using noise. Noise rock is not a coherent style, but a loose term for quite different approaches to a noise aesthetic within a post-punk idiom. It began in New York under the label of "No Wave" in the late 70's and in Germany with Einstrzende Neubauten and other bands centered around "Die Geniale Dilletanten" around 1980. In the UK, actual noise rock did not emerge before 1985, when The Jesus & Mary Chain created the British, more melodic, variant.
It is not within the limits of this essay to give an overview of the noise rock and electronica scene and all its different sub-categories, but I will mention some of the most influential styles and names: Sonic Youth took off from guitar composer Glenn Branca to create their very own harmonic style and guitar techniques (see example below). Bands like Swans and Big Black used noise as a dark, hellish force in their aggressive, Gothic tales. Hsker D, Dinosaur Jr. and others bridged the gap between post-punk and the impending grunge scene with their straightforward use of noisy guitars. My Bloody Valentine (see example below), A.R. Kane, Lush, Ride and many other British bands used guitar noise to create a more poetic, dreamy atmosphere, labeled 'dreampop' or "shoegazer". Band of Susans made a minimal, mantra-like use of guitar noise with a British equivalent in bands Loop and Spacemen 3. Young Gods and Ministry, among others, used the sampler as a noise generator. In Japan, a noise scene grew out of the 70's free jazz environment of Tokyo, featuring Keiji Haino, High Rise, The Boredoms, Merzbow and others.
By 1991 the development of guitar noise seemed to come to an end, culminating with My Bloody Valentine's Loveless as a worthy climax. Guitar noise had gone mainstream with blockbusters like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, and the sound possibilities seemed permanently exhausted. The place for noise exploration was no longer to be found on the rock scene but rather in electronic music.
Electronica uses noise in many different ways, sometimes so integrated that any distinction between noise and music is heavily blurred. Samples, drumloops, fast breakbeats, dub bass and of course all sorts of computer-generated sounds can be more or less noisy. An important trend is "glitch", where errors are inflicted on CDs causing it to skip and get stuck. Oval is probably the most convincing glitch-artist, creating a blurred atmosphere not unlike that of My Bloody Valentine. Only few electronic artists, such as Merzbow (see below), deal exclusively with noise.

Four music examples
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth made their debut at the so-called Noise Festival in New York, 1981, an event that marked the end of No Wave and the beginning of something new. With guitar composer Glenn Branca as their father figure, they set out to 'reinvent the guitar', considering the guitar a far richer instrument than normally acknowledged, containing a wide range of possibilities.
The guitar can be used as a percussion instrument, beating the strings with a broken drumstick, a screwdriver, or what-ever is at hand. Combining this effect with feedback, Sonic Youth created a bell-like, pealing sound. Every possibility of the instrument - the guitar, the pick-ups, the amplifier, even the electric plugs - were explored, and, as their most original characteristic, the strings were tuned differently, creating a new, more dissonant (sometimes even microtonal) harmonics, far from the general rock idiom. Sonic Youth developed an arsenal of more than 40 guitars each with its own tuning; often the two guitarists play with each their tuning at the same time.
A characteristic trait is what I shall call "the maelstrom of noise," in which the tune and rhythm break off into a whirl of noise, gradually intensifying tempo and volume, absorbing the listener into its ecstatic black hole. This chaotic vortex is in opposition to the structural, formal elements of music, exceeding the boundaries of the senses, although still controlled on a higher level. The maelstrom is at the same time an explosion of energy and an implosion of meaning, turning away from the distinct and semantic into the sublime and ecstatic.
The common effect of noise in music is the aggressive,raging expression also found in the maelstrom of Sonic Youth. Noise is a vehement means, reflecting inner and outer chaos and conflict. But, as the next example will show, noise can also be used to evoke a very different experience.

My Bloody Valentine
My Bloody Valentine also had the ambition of reinventing the guitar, albeit with entirely different means and effects than Sonic Youth. In their music, noise is not aggressive, but low-key. Noise becomes introvert, dreamy, almost languidly erotic. This especially goes for the album Loveless and the related ep's Glider and Tremolo.
Listening to My Bloody Valentine one encounters a diffuse blurred harmonics. The guitar chords are gliding, swimming in a muddy sea of distortion. The guitarists' strokes are cut off in the mixing process, so that every sound seems to be growing out of nowhere, with no distinct edges. My Bloody Valentine extract all kinds of sound from the guitar, manipulating it in different ways, also by means of the sampler, so that, for instance, feedback can be transformed into a whistling, melodic instrument. The vocals are placed in the background of the sound stage on the same level as the other sounds, making the words almost undecipherable. The noise on Loveless is extraordinarily integrated in the music, not as a distinct layer of sound and not placed in opposition to an otherwise structural clarity.
All these effects put together with the sleepy motion and sweet, dreamy tunes, form an unreal, disorienting sound picture, "the-not-quite-really-there-sound", as they themselves have called it. The dense sound makes no illusion of an acoustic space. It is claustrophobic; almost like being in an infinitely intimate place. There, the music affects you like the most coveted, yet vulnerable, states: tenderness, love, sex. You have to get very close, to immerse yourself in the web of noises to be able to let the vocals whisper sweet words in your ear. The blurriness of My Bloody Valentine's sound is like the blurriness of getting so close to an object that you lose the outlines of it. And this object is as soft as a tender body.
But the disorientation takes the experience even further than a concrete sexual encounter, towards a more abstract, impersonal intimateness. There is not really an I-you-relation (as in a normal pop song), there is no room for such a distance; the intimacy is overwhelming, ambivalent and transgressive of any subjectivity, suggesting something akin to an incestuous, narcissistic or pre-oedipal relation.
My Bloody Valentine has made a new psychedelia without turning to the effects of the old; a psychedelia of noise. At their live concerts the band experimented with ending the performance with a sustained dose of sheer noise. They developed this stunt to perfection, culminating on the Loveless tour 1992, where a piercing, dazzling white light was thrown out into the faces of the audience while the pure noise took on new dimensions in volume and lasted for more than 15 minutes. This was a stark contrast to the soft, colorful preceding concert and provoked two different reactions: half of the audience left in protest or aural pain, while the other half stayed to find out what this would bring. And the experiences were very special. People underwent different ecstatic states, all pertaining to the trans-individual or pre-subjective: out-of-body-experiences, nirvana-like states, visions of being swallowed up by a giant vagina; and my own: hearing phantom lullabies that I've never heard before very detailed and continuing to play in my head when I got home in bed. These experiences are not only an effect of an overload of the nervous system but are also inextricably tied up to the preceding concert, opening the mind towards the most intimate feelings.

Merzbow
Under the name of Merzbow, Tokyo based Masami Akita has produced pure noise music since 1979, and especially in the 90's he has released a staggering number of electronically based releases, culminating in the 50 CD ( artwork and CD-ROM) set Merzbox, a giant compilation of his finest work. Not only very productive, but also very consistent, he is constantly operating close to the limit of what can meaningfully be called music. Starting from Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, considered by many a terminal point for music, he exploits the varieties of noise without supplying it with any melodic material. Merzbow's music is an ear-splitting assault on the body, at least, that is, until the nervous system is allowed to gradually relax from the state of alarm and enter the world of sensing extreme noise as music.
The name Merzbow is derived from Dadaist Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau (aka Cathedral of Erotic Misery), a work in progress built by the use of found garbage material. If noise is the trash of music, the sounds that we traditionally discard as non-musical, then Merzbow is a trash artist, tirelessly seeking odd and convulsive beauty in the garbage cans of sonic waste. And, like Schwitters, Merzbow's art is essentially urban, reacting to the overload of sensuous impressions in the big city. As a sort of apotropaic3 shield he throws the noise of Tokyo back into our ears, transforming it into an aesthetic experience.
No specific phenomena are recognizable, though. The Merzbow noise is abstract, minimal, deprived of mimetic content. Its effect is immediate, an overload of the nervous system, not being able to sort out the information into categories of relevant and irrelevant hence the normal reaction of fear and discomfort when confronted with Merzbow noise. "Noise is the unconsciousness of music", Merzbow states, in the same way as his other main interest, pornography and bondage, is the unconsciousness of sex. Merzbow noise is linked with fear, conflict and aggression as in rock music, but defying any melodies, the pure noise does not incite the listener to ecstatic bliss, but remains hard and somewhat conceptual to most of its audience.4

Curd Duca: Touch
Curd Duca's "Touch" (1999)5 is a recent example of communicative noise, continuing a tradition of cut-up vocals that can be traced back to Stockhausen's Gesang der Jnglinge (1956). A female voice sings a line with a keyboard in the background, but we never hear it as a line, it sounds like the CD is damaged, causing it to stutter for a while and then jump to another stutter. The message is disturbed, almost indecipherable. The word "touch" is clear, though, several times manifest in its full length followed by a few notes before it collapses into the ongoing fragmentation. It is almost like a cubistic painting, a fractured view seeing things from different angles, constantly shifting its focus.
The music of this radical sample collage is beautiful. The vocal is gentle and sensually affectionate, singing the few notes of the sample in a longing way, as if reaching out to touch someone. Actually, after a reconstruction, the words seem to be "you'd be like heaven to touch". This message, this gesture, is too disturbed to be communicated. The disturbance is, of course, not really a device error, but it hints at the familiar sound of a CD player not being able to read the digital information on the disc.
A work like this could be seen as a reflection of a cultural situation in which clear communication is disturbed and direct exchange of affections is threatened. The undamaged sample would risk being too sentimental, too pathetic to survive as more than a clich in a postmodern world of information overload. Cutting it into pieces and transforming its banal state-
ment into a more disturbing beauty actually makes it more authentic by virtue of alienation.
In this piece, noise is not a certain acoustic quality, as in the other examples, but a distortion of the message and of the melody by use of malfunction-like effects

Towards an aesthetics of noise
In various ways, noise as a sensual, aesthetic phenomenon points out of the field of the subject as a divided entity, towards what could be called the transsubjective, that which transgresses the individual. This applies to the explosive ecstasy as well as the implosive intimacy. This transsubjective point is also bridging the gap between rock music, normally considered subjective, and electronica, normally considered objective. With noise, rock turns away from its standard focus of a subject expressing his/her feelings, towards a more anonymous state. This was manifested on stage by My Bloody Valentine, having no focus on the band members, who appear only as shadows in front of a big screen with abstract psychedelic films projected on it. The following reflections on noise as Dionysian ecstasy and as abjectal intimacy points in this direction.

The Dionysian and the sublime
The ecstasy of noise is predominantly aggressive and vehement, as the maelstrom of noise in Sonic Youth. This is often an aesthetization of violence and suffering, the noise being an ingredient in what one might call a Dionysian aesthetic. In Die Geburt der Tragdie (The Birth of Tragedy) Friedrich Nietzsche described the Apollonian and the Dionysian as two principles of aesthetic attitudes toward suffering, working together in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Richard Wagner.
Apollo represents appearance, form, individuality, beauty and dream; the Apollonian aesthetics is an embellishment of suffering, a self-conscious lie, a veiling of cruelty by use of form and elegance, a semblance of beauty. Dionysus, on the other hand, represents ecstasy, being, will, intoxication and unity; the Dionysian aesthetics is a direct confrontation with the terrible foundation of being, an absurd will driving us all in our meaningless lives. In the Dionysian ecstasy individuality is transgressed6 in favor of identification with the universal will - a frightening yet blissful experience. Frightening, that is, because it is a death-like giving up of the Ego, if only for a few seconds; blissful in letting go of the responsibilities of being a subject. The Dionysian experience is a "metaphysical comfort", knowing that suffering is a necessary part of the effects of the eternal will the destruction of things in order to create anew. In the Dionysian ecstasy one is no longer concerned with one's individual suffering, seeing instead things from the universal point of view.
In music, the ecstasy of noise is undoubtedly a Dionysian effect, as opposed to the Apollonian melody and form.7 As mentioned above, the German words Rausch (ecstasy) and Gerusch (noise) are related, pointing towards this fact. The Dionysian is that which is not totally controlled or formed, e.g. screams and noises. The Apollonian elements are seductive, inciting the listener to enter the ecstatic bliss of the Dionysian, enabling the listener to dare the confrontation with the dreadfulness of existence. Therefore, Nietzsche says, the Dionysian needs the Apollonian.
Merzbow is so demanding exactly because he refuses this; he does not soften the harshness of noise with any Apollonian elements. Listening to Merzbow is thus a very different experience from the Sonic Youth maelstrom.
One of the reasons for the ecstatic effect of noise is its sublime character. The sublime is that which exceeds the limits of the senses, perceived as chaos or vastness. Despite our ability to put these words to it, the sublime goes beyond making sense - we never really understand it. The complexityof noise (in the acoustic sense) overloads the ears and the nervous system and is perceived as an amorphous mass, incomprehensible yet stirring. The delight of the sublime is the satisfaction of confronting the unfathomable.

Abject noise
As mentioned above, noises are the sounds that are discarded as being impure, unmusical. Music traditionally expurgates the dirty noise and fosters the pure tones. But noise belongs to the same pool of sounds from which music stems. Ideally, music is thus defining itself by a detachment from its origin. This is abjection, using the term coined by Julia Kristeva.
The abjects, in Kristeva's sense, are the rejections from the body: stool, sperm, spittle, snot, nail clippings etc., considered dirty and repulsive. The reason why we are (more or less) repelled by the abject is that it threatens our individuality, being neither subject nor object, but something in-between, confusing our delimitation as individuals. The bodily cleansing process is a way of upholding one's individuality, fearing the blur between the objective surroundings and ourselves. To confront ourselves with the abject is strongly ambivalent, a combination of pleasure and fear, reminding us at the same time of the pre-oedipal symbiosis with the mother and of death, the end of individuality.
Taking noise back, music confronts itself with its abject, plays with it, like a child playing with its stool, metaphorically speaking. This is perhaps a reason for the effects of My Bloody Valentine's music, combining extreme intimacy and noise into something very sweet, but also implementing the fear of this (almost incestuous) closeness.

Noise as multiplicity
In his book Gense the French philosopher Michel Serres develops an idea of the ultimate being-in-itself as noise. Behind the phenomenal world (the world we perceive) is an infinite complexity, an incomprehensible multitude, an analogue to white noise. All concepts, all understanding of the world is an ordering of this chaos,8 this multiplicity, "noise." Serres uses the term "noise" with two meanings: the English (noise) and the old French word "noise," meaning quarrel. He also hints at the Greek, maritime origin, "nausea" (see above). The multiplicity is conflict-ridden and noisy.
Noise and conflict are normally closely related in music as well. This aspect of noise is the reason why it is often used to express anger, fear and violence. Noise in music belongs, of course, to the phenomenal world, but exists at the limits of our senses, pointing metonymically towards a more fundamental noise, the chaos of the pre-phenomenal world. When we are confronted with a massive dose of noise, we often create our own sounds in our heads, "phantomic sounds", as a desperate way of relating to the audible chaos.
There is also, I think, a more sociological perspective to this. In today's society it is impossible to take in all the information that surrounds us; we are constantly forced to sort out loads of information to be able to find (hear) the desired or relevant information. Information society is verging on noise society, a state in which the information, meant to convey knowledge, ends up losing the ability to speak at all. Our culture becomes taciturn without being silent, moving towards a noisy muteness.

So what?
I have often been asked whether noise is subversive. I tend towards the answer "no, not directly, but it has a critical potential." If subversion is what punk imagined itself to be, a riot that shocks bourgeois culture, I do not see any such possibilities in music. It might even be questioned whether punk really had that kind of effect. In the present historical situation, youth culture riots are verging on kitsch. There are a lot of reasons for this, the most visible being that rebel youth has become a lifestyle segment in commercial marketing.
Noise does not have a fixed, aesthetic meaning. Its phenomenological character depends on the musical as well as institutional context in which it is integrated. As we have seen above, noise is for instance not always aggressive and loud. Still, there are some common features: noise tends to abandon subjectivity, individuality, rationality, homogeneity and control in favor of the objectively irrational, the pre- or non-subjective sublime, something unstable and complex. This is a marginal phenomenon and not a permanent realm for anyone to enter. Still, it has (or has had) the potential of being critical of smooth calculation, ascetic rationality and habitual life. Such a critique does not come automatically with noise, of course, but only when reflecting a historical situation and at the same time embodying what is culturally repressed.

Torben Sangild

Published by DATANOM
Edited by Pelle Krgholt

Notes:
(1) This brief essay is partly based on my comprensive research in Stjrock og stjens stetik.
(2) For an unfolding of the composed music part and especially the rock part, see Sangild: Stjrock og stjens stetik.
(3) Apotropaism is a ritual way of warding off evil by depicting it, for instance by making an image of some evil threat. This is one of the most ancient motivations of art.
(4) Sometimes the hard-core noise audience experiences a certain trance effect, though.
(5) From the album "Elevator Music 2" (Mille Plateaux 1999).
(6) The word Ecstasy (derived from Greek) means "standing out (from oneself)".
(7) I am not following Nietzsche's connection of the Apollonian with poetry and the (metric) rhythm in music, making melody a Dionysian element. For an unfolding of the argument, see Sangild: Stjrock og stjens stetik.
(8) Serres does not use the word chaos, lest being associated with chaos theory.

Literature:
Julia Kristeva: The Powers of Horror, 1982.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Die Geburt der Tragdie, 1872.
Torben Sangild: Stjrock og stjens stetik 1996/97. Unpublished. (www.datanom.com/noise)
Michel Serres: Gense, 1982.

Scars

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:51:07 GMT

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal.
A scar is what happens when the word is made fles
—Leonard Cohen

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.Alvarez, The Savage God, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1971

Armando R. Favazza, Bodies Under Siege, The John Hopkins University Press, London, 1996

Gordon Houghton, The Dinner Party, Anchor fiction, London,1998

Elizabeth Jennings, Selected Poems, Carcanet, Exeter, 1985

Patrick Jones, Fuse, Parthian Books, 2001, Cardiff

Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted, Virago, 1995, London

Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game, Griffin Trade Paperback, New York, 2000

Karl Menninger, A Psychiatrist's World, Viking Press, New York, 1959

Joyce Carol Oates, Love and Derangements, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1970

Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 1981

Anne Sexton, The selected poems, Virago, London, 1991

M. Strong, A bright red scream, San Francisco Focus, Dec 1993, 58-144

J.R.R Tolkein, The Silmarillion, HarperCollins, London, 1999

Winchel RM and Stanley M, Self-injurious behaviour, A review of the behaviour and biology of self-mutilation, Am J Psychiatry 148, New York, 1991, 306-17

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation, Quartet Books, 1995, London

WEBSITES

D. Martinson, Secret Shame, http://www.selfharm.net/

Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Significance of the Blood, http://www.dreamwater.net/redego/cut.html

NOTES

1 Winchel RM and Stanley M, Self-injurious behaviour, A review of the behaviour and biology of self-mutilation, Am J Psychiatry 148, New York, 1991, 306-17
2 Armando R. Favazza, Bodies Under Siege, The John Hopkins University Press, London, 1996,103
3 Stereotypical self-injury refers to monotonously repetitive acts. Superficial refers to cutting and burning - the most frequent forms. Ibid, 237.
4 Ibid, 243
5 Ibid, 24.
6 Ibid.
7 J.R.R Tolkein, The Silmarillion, HarperCollins, London, 1999, 125
8 Elizabeth Jennings, About these things, Selected Poems, Carcanet, Exeter, 1985, 80
9 Sylvia Plath, Three Women, Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, London, 1981, 176
10 Ibid, The Other, 201
11 Ibid, A Birthday Present, 206
12 Anne Sexton, The Kiss, The selected poems, Virago, London, 1991, 62
13 A. Alvarez, The Savage God, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1971, 120
14 Ibid, 4
15 Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Significance of the Blood, http://www.dreamwater.net/redego/cut.html
16 Armando R. Favazza, Bodies Under Siege, The John Hopkins University Press, London, 1996, 156
17 Joyce Carol Oates, Passing an Afternoon, Love and Derangements, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1970, 67
18 Gordon Houghton, The Dinner Party, Anchor fiction, 1998, London, 9
19 Ibid, 153
20 Ibid, 65
21 ibid, 186
22 Ibid, 27
23 The Guardian, February 25th 1999
24 Patrick Jones, Everything Must Go, Fuse, Parthian Books, 2001, Cardiff
25 Patrick Jones, delirium in white silence, Fuse, Parthian Books, 2001, Cardiff, 107
26 Ibid, memoria, 44
27 Ibid, carelines, 121
28 Ibid, the daylight of the fading, 101
29 Ibid, 156
30 Ibid, 176
31 Ibid, 157 and 204
32 Ibid, scardust, 82
33 Ibid, the unsaid, 75
34 Armando R. Favazza, Bodies Under Siege, The John Hopkins University Press, London, 1996, 270
35 Karl Menninger, A Psychiatrist's World, Viking Press, New York, 1959, 285
36 Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game, Griffin Trade Paperback, New York, 2000, 189
37 Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation, Quartet Books, 1995, London, 41
38 Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted, Virago, 1995, London, 153
39 A. Alvarez, The Savage God, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1971, 4

LOOK HERE

http://theburrow.zzap64.co.uk/personal/selfinjury/wound.html

THE BODY SAYS WHAT WORDS CANNOT

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:48:52 GMT

The advancement in the psychological understanding of self-injury has been rapid since the surge of interest in the 1960s. Freud's subsuming of all mutilative activity into suicidal ideation has been overwritten, starting with Karl Menninger in 1938 who was the first psychiatrist to posit self-mutilation as a form of self-healing, in that a person may avert total self-destruction by substituting the destruction of the body in a non-fatal manner (34). 'In this sense it represents a victory, even though sometimes a costly one, of the life instinct over the death instinct' (35). This substitution theory still associates the act with suicide, and the most recent psychiatric studies take great care to delineate the two acts. Interestingly in the works of Plath and Sexton, in comparison to the most recent poet in this study Patrick Jones, it is far harder to separate the two acts: though perhaps this should not be so surprising as both female poets where acquainted and influenced by Freud's works. The concept of destroying something in the self through physical damage is a fairly common element of literature concerned in some way with self-injury. The more recent confessional novels like that of Caroline Kettlewell Skin Game where the protagonist avers 'I needed to kill something in me, this awful feeling like worms tunnelling along my nerves' are particularly direct in their expressions of this concept (and indeed of other such concepts) and have less of an artful construction to them (36). Another recurrent association, which has already been partly discussed, is the image of self-injurer as an artist engaged in transforming the body and self into an artistic object. An artful fantasy, with albeit more commonplace cultural connections to tattooing and scarification, which has the purpose of allowing the author and self-injurer the distance needed to analyse and understand the suffering self. Elizabeth Wurtzel in Prozac Nation describes her body as 'A perfect clean canvas' which echoes directly already discussed images from Jones and Houghton (37). This dissociation from the self, to give it its scientific name, explains the literary presentation of the act in creative terms. It also compliments the idea of self-injury as communicative, except that the communicative interaction is imaged between the self and the self constructed other:

My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it; even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself ("counteract feelings of 'numbness'"). I was demonstrating, externally and irrefutably, an inward condition. (38)

'The body says what words cannot', to place the choreographer Martha Graham's comments in a completely unintended context. Necessarily then the task of the writer who wishes to wrestle the concept of self-injury into the written form is made doubly difficult. It creates a self-perpetuating problem - if words are not an adequate expression of pain for the self-injurer then how is the writer to place this experience in words, since such a resort has been categorically rejected as inadequate? Indeed what then is to be made of the self-injuring poet? Very little in reality, because it is crucial to recognise both creative acts as necessarily deceptive illusions and separate to the actual, physical self.

Alvarez in The Savage God talks of how partial every scientific explanation of suicide must necessarily be, reductive and objective by requirement there can be no compensation for what is achieved in understanding through the creative activity of authorship. Literature is, by its very nature, concerned with what Pavese termed 'this business of living'; its purpose if we are to acknowledge the need for one, is to further our understanding of what exactly this business entails (39). It is becoming clear, after so many thousands of years, that self-injury is very much part of this business and its increase in frequency requires understanding and acceptance. This is not to stipulate a necessity for a socially committed art whenever self-injury is included, far from it as its very inclusion and use in an original and creative fashion, both initiates and signals the very achievements desired by those involved with the treatment of this disorder. There is nothing more alienating than the exclusion of an individual's experience from the realm of creative literature. Literature, if it is to be granted no other acknowledgement by the critical establishment, is a profound method of connecting people to each other, to knowledge and ultimately to their selves.

If the purpose of self-harm for the sufferer is as Linda Katherine Cutting in Memory Slips asserts 'making the invisible somehow visible... making themselves and all they've been through disappear' then engraining their experiences and perceptions in creative literature preserves understanding and alleviates false shame. Making the experience visible and externalised, in the healing form of words completes a process and subverts any requisite for the symbolism of blood. Every individual must inscribe their identity in some form, the creation of a self and the understanding of that self are a necessary requirement for individuality. The Dinner Party shows the devastation of such a process gone wrong, the identity inscribed falsely through The Rite of Cutting and the folly of attempting to utilise the inscribed self as a substitute for all other forms of significance. The connection between the creative and expressive purpose of self-injury is quite clearly emphasised by the works discussed in this study. In Jones' language occupies the paradoxical, yet psychologically accurate position of being both the polar opposite of self-harm and the non-verbal equivalent. To express with the tool of language, to master its use, is to overcome the silence and incapacity that characterises the malaise of modern existence. This is why for Jones' there is even 'eloquence in screaming', however primal, any expressive sound is preferable to the silence which devours and destroys.

Anne Sexton referred to suicide as the opposite of the poem, a comment that although certainly easy to intellectually appreciate is not quite carried through by her poetry or indeed the poetry of Plath. The presence of some threatening element, some disturbance within the self, which calls harm upon that self and equally calls up the inspiration for protective words cast in the form of poetry says something deeply powerful about the psyche of the self-injurer. The perceptive power that both poets seem to have over areas of life that encapsulate the motivation towards self-harm are both positive and productive for understanding the inherent quality of the disorder. Humanity's very drive to survive can become irrational and twisted under strong enough influences, that the source of these conflicting drives was one and the same is one of the most unsettling and atavistic sensations found in Sexton and Plath's work.

The foundation for the most recent and intriguing literary explorations of self-injury have been the works where the founding principle is not 'let wound be my word' but rather let wound become word. Though the act may be a resort for those disillusioned by the inadequacies of language, for the writer the concept must be transformed into something communicable and accessible. Ultimately to let wound become word is to empower and transfigure an act which masquerades as creative into something that actually is. As a source of creativity self-injury is an entirely, as of yet, unexploited area of literature a fact which, in itself is indeed surprising considering its conspicuous historical presence across time and cultures. To utilise Jones' words something must surely grow from these first hesitant literary steps, as the definitive text seems yet to be written. The foundations and thematic networks have been prepared, all that is required is the architect unafraid to break new ground - however relatively uncharted the territory must seem.

TOO SOON THE KNIFE/ TOO LATE THE WORDS

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:48:13 GMT

'Language is a holy thing, the best tool we have for articulating rage' (23). For Patrick Jones, poet and playwright, the inability to articulate rage is at the heart of a modern society that has become its own malaise. His works are certainly products of the Trainspotting era, but their raw poignancy is balanced by a cultured intellect and accomplished style. His words rant, shock and haunt but they do so with an original finesse and painful adherence to truth. Elements of nihilism there may be, but this is not the concluding focus of his poems and plays. Everything Must Go may be his first play's title, but its raison d'etre is 'something must grow' (24). In the same breath of denunciation it pulses forth with affirmation, it's not oblivious rebellion it's life, art, protest, thought and meaning. Oblivious rebellion is antithetical to Jones' striving for emotional articulation. Jones' Welsh heritage is clearly a central locus for his works, he's been hailed as 'doing for Welsh theatre what the Manics and Catatonia have done for its music', but this is not central to this study. What is, is his emotional exploration of what produces the pressure cooker of rage within the voices' that populate his poems and plays. For Jones' self-injury proliferates within a society that has created false needs, dreams and people who cannot express what they intuitively know - that this is how not to live.

The axis of every poem in Fuse is a memorable aphoristic phrase or phrases, modern, fluid and crafted. Jones has the ability to pack more into phrases than should be linguistically possible; his words are superficially concrete and yet elastically enclose vast areas and concepts of thought. He makes frequent use of the discrepancy between words' cognitive and emotional meanings, which leads him to arrange his poems on the page in ways that recall e.e.cummings. These are tendencies he's had to moderate slightly for his dramatic ventures, where the rhetoric does occasionally threaten the drama, but essentially his style is consistent through both genres.

The presence of self-injury within Jones' work is both palpable and discreet, there is not one single poem in the collection that does not contain some reference and yet there is not one poem that is dedicated solely to the topic. It occurs with most force where Jones' focuses on his most prevalent theme, the inexpressible rage that must be expressed, and he explores the link between the two by meshing SI images and images of speech together. Most simply he says in Sanctorum number one, 'too soon the knife/ too late the words' though it is the same thought concept as that of 'delirium in white silence':

dragging itself from the hook
to parry thoughts
like suicide
(25)

'Unspokened' is a perfect example of how the poet meshes the two ideas together; words are the defence and the alternative. There is the characteristic rage, 'the prozac ain't no bandage to this much blood' lines which border maudlin and accusation at each pole of reasoning, but there are lines that are darkly beautiful with hope which comes only from the keenest insight. memoria offers what many of the poems conclude with, that 'there is springtime in death...as even in choking there is breath' and takes as a central image the crucifixion of Christ - which as already discussed has psychological connections to SI. The same reversal of life and death, harm and healing, which is so central to SI is present but Jones' darkens his vision only to blaze into light at the end. He tears the temple down only to rebuild.

In this
blood within wound / flesh over nails/ sky above man/ weep into
why
placenta through death
in memory/ in hope/ in hurt/ in plea/

there are seeds planted daily
even though then is pain
today today
shall have a tomorrow
there is springtime in death
there is prayer in sorrow
though yesterday burns
today
today shall have a tomorrow (26)

Though Jones is capable of the dark affirming psyche of the self-injurer, the aggressive rage that defends the act, it is rare that this is indulged without some crippling counter awareness. let wound be my word asserts 'carelines' but the poem finds its home in the final two lines spaced far apart on a page all of their own: 'the memories that crack us/ are the scars that make us - ' (27). Though the poems ultimately reject SI they pass through temporary endorsements in areas that are common to the other works within this study. 'The bled artery/ healing/ the Stanley knife/ cutting/ the decaying marrow from this existence' balances itself upon the inversion of harm and healing, but the line arrangement adds doubt, the isolation of healing and cutting on their own lines separates the thought concepts and magnifies their importance (28).

Everything Must Go and Unprotected Sex are plays' about emotional consequences. Unprotected Sex is about the dangers inherent in the modern male, who represses cardinal emotions, and Everything Must Go is a picture of exactly what have and have-not can mean. Of course there is much more to these theatrical works, more than can be effectively conveyed merely by words, and Everything Must Go almost suffers from being too thematically rich. It's dramatic set piece casts the play in the revenge tragedy mould, but the loss of hope that taints each of the main characters' lives - Cindy, Pip, Jim, Curtis and A - is what motivates their internal dramas. They speak for a generation that has no voice, consistently the pro-noun is we, and they do so through lyrics, poetry and colloquial slang set to the background of popular music. The voice of the self-injurer is found in the sensitive Cindy, who resorts to SI when she can no longer deal with her intense despair at the poverty and urbanisation that surrounds her. She expresses in the stammering eloquence so typical of Jones', the contradictions of SI, the pushing away and the pulling towards, the healing and harming; that makes the disorder so difficult to abandon.

My scars remind me that I'm alive...

...SCARS. i love them i hate them i feel safe i feel shattered in them like no-one can touch me - all orange and red like - it's all too fucking fragile... (29)

The play progressively becomes more an oratory, the verbal quick fires more a performance poem; and Cindy more symbolic than personal: 'I am your sacrifice we we are your sacrifice' (30). The turning point for her character is in the blood ritual she performs with a Welsh doll, a representation of purification that allows growth. Her monologue, that so clearly draws upon the emotional resonance of T.S Eliot, precedes and acts as a companion to the direct action A takes in murdering the factory boss: 'BOOM/ we are a living exhibition of how not to be/ BOOM/ one day we are gonna find our voice/ BOOM/ We are nothing and should be everything'. Though the ominous power of the group incantations has more force, Cindy is the striking counterpoint, her most poignant moments springing from the sheer truth and simplicity of her phrasing. Her tripartite address to self-injury as 'my friend my safety my belonging' is a mantra that rests easier in memory than her ultimate assertion of hope 'No more bleeding, this is my beginning' (31).

There is that quality in Jones' work, which is always reaching beyond the verbal; appealing to something, which must remain protectively unarticulated and yet will continually strive to find a voice the more pressure is culturally laid upon it. Self-injury is both a parallel and symptom of this condition. Cindy's candid, primitive emoting rests uneasy in memory precisely because her expression crosses an unspoken barrier into the verbal. Self-injury is part of that primitive, pre-verbal and distasteful heritage we would rather repress, it is an 'unsaid' disorder on so many levels and Jones' is in a position to exploit this fully in his literature. There is something so elementally simple to his poem entitled the unsaid that it is easy to underestimate just what he has succeeded in accessing, to dismiss the palpable and concrete effect achieved. It is an innately modern tableau, uniquely effective and appropriate for the self-injurer of the last decade. Isolated, secretive, enclosed, struggling to articulate and desperately aware of how little can be conveyed or known through language, which they substitute with what they 'embroider into [their] flesh' (32).

autumned nights

know
of the
torn wrist
b
l
e
e
d
ing
undercovers
the bloodshot eye
staring
at the orangelit glow of
3am (33)

THESE WOUNDS ARE MY HISTORY, A BOOK OF STORIES

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:47:24 GMT

The Dinner Party is truly a critically neglected work of post-modernist literature. So many of the novel's central themes reach into the chest of modern western society coolly twanging the strings it finds there, and leaving the reader decidedly unsettled. However, reviewers who cannot see past the surface play of violence and morbid humour to the underlying authorial intent have misconstrued the reason for this sense of unease. One way of describing the layers of emotional reaction is to compare the novel with Nickolai Gogol's The Overcoat. Gogol artfully encourages a reader to mock the protagonist, only later to accumulate a call upon the reader's sympathy, leaving the reader consumed with disabling guilt and self-criticism. In The Dinner Party Houghton manipulates the reader in a similar fashion. The murder around which the narrative is structured is predictable and has a cheap shock value, but this is intended, because the murder is not what the novel is about. The novel is about moral relativism.

To continue the allusions to Russian literature the character of Felix Fly finds his origins in Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment protagonist. Like Raskolnikov, Felix creates his own set of arbitrary moral standards, which are unacceptable to wider society. His belief systems are based solely on what he can locate within his self, his experiences and his ideas. He has his own rituals, his own sacred objects and taboos, his own rules about correct behaviour; and he has an explanation for his origins, and methods for protecting himself against an uncertain future. Essentially he is self-mythologizing, creating a religion with his self at the centre and, like the very systems of belief which left the void he fills with that self, the centre indeed cannot hold. Once again a seemingly protective, creative act has become its antithesis.

From its' first page The Dinner Party is self-conscious. Its utilisation of the confessional form, the audio dictation of the narrative, enhances this style's effects and imbues the novel with the comfortable feel of perfect candour. 'Let's be honest', it begins and this might as well be the novel's watch word - honesty to Felix is an extreme version of post-modernist honesty, that is a relative honesty (18). Felix lives a secret life, he hides his true nature and true emotions, and yet is brutally honest with himself - he knows he desires the comfort of allowing another person into his world, yet fears misunderstanding, rejection and alienation. Thus we have the moral relativism, an extreme reaction to perceived rejection by the world. After all what motivates the confessional form if not a desire to provoke understanding and be reconciled? Fear of rejection by a hostile world has turned Felix inward into a self, which desperately needs understanding. The result is the self-destructive personality which is tempted to fail the test of acceptance, that dares the world as Plath's poetry does at times, with snide humour, to acknowledge just how alienated that personality is (19).

Self-injury plays a key, and somewhat controversial role in the novel. It does little to improve the public image of self-injury; though we can feel some sympathy for Felix he ultimately commits a grizzly murder. For those readers who already misunderstand what self-injury is, and what kind of people suffer from it, this sends the worst kind of message possible. In fact, for those who have a better understanding of self-injury, The Dinner Party demonstrates not only a comprehensive and perceptive knowledge of self-injury, but also the nerve to utilise that knowledge creatively.

The importance of ritual, both as an origin and in the practice of self-injury, has been well documented in psychiatric studies such as Favazza's Bodies Under Siege. What Houghton does is embellish the ritualistic elements of self-injury in order to emphasise his commentary on man's need for significance. Felix can only locate significance within his own self, and as a record of his significant history he carves symbols onto his body, which he describes in artistic and religious terms.

So. I'm holding the Scalpel between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, as I did all those years ago during the first Rite. I feel now as I did then. With this instrument in my grasp I am artist and canvas, a sculptor of skin, a drawer of blood. I am high priest and sacrifice. I am my own altar. This is not merely a blade: it carries the ceremonial weight of history, the memory of a hundred similar blades, each one cutting flesh, carving it own mark on the past. (20)

Quite literally he has become his own reference book, unwilling to trust anything outside the self he has turned history, religion and art inward. One of the cathartic conclusions that the narrator lights upon is the fallibility of seeking any kind of significance, and especially the danger of locating the self as the centre of significance. The dark, quirky humour that Felix utilises does much to make him a sympathetic character, but more importantly it suggests that Felix has been very aware of his actions' fallibility and underlines that his rituals are, above all, defensive.

I said something about a need to do it, to release the pressure. My body - my mind - was like a pressure cooker. And it was like the blood was all the anger and anguish inside, and when I released it, when I opened the valve in the skin, the bad blood and the tension escaped, and everything returned to normal, and I could be normal... (21)

The artistic rhetoric falls away, and Felix is left with the reality that he is not priest, artist or even pariah, but merely someone who has suffered traumatic experiences and allowed a coping mechanism to reach dangerous levels of control in his life. He knows this, Houghton couches even the more high-flown descriptions of the Rite in enough daily emotion to underline this, but Felix simply cannot retract himself from his own augury. The Rite, as he sees it, is his self; there is no escaping it: again the juxtaposition and inversion of the concepts of creativity and destruction.

There are scars covering almost all of my body. These wounds are my history, a book of stories, some more interesting than others, all varying length, shape and style, all unique. Some are deep and white and run from my neck down to my groin and beyond, carved in moments of great anguish and self-doubt, or during the closing moments of an important ceremony. Some are cut to create unusual shapes, such as the bicycle on my right calf just below the knee; or in Significant places, such as the flames that ripple along my left arm from the elbow to the shoulder, which come alive when my biceps are flexed. Most are small, seemingly inconsequential scratches, apparently without meaning; but these incisions are the essential background without which the great flourishes would have no context or merit. They are the result of year upon year of meticulous attention to the demands of the Rite of Cutting. Whenever I step into the bath and immerse myself in its uterine serenity, the agony of these scars reminds me of what I have done, what I have been. (22)

Gordon Houghton's willingness to deal creatively, and often light heartedly, with self-injury might be looked upon as a turning point in the issue's understanding, however the rare and often hostile reviews (Houghton joked that most reviewers wouldn't touch the novel with a barge pole) offer in turn a rather bleak commentary on current popular opinion.

AND THE UNIVERSE SLIDE FROM MY SIDE

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:46:08 GMT

The 'I' of Sylvia Plath's poetry is, in many ways, synonymous with suffering. Undoubtedly an artful construction, the 'I' is a tragic figure functioning as the slippery centre to a classical drama, with a limited vision and god-like ego. However a poet both creates and is created by his art, the 'I' of lyric poetry does achieve autonomy from the personal life of the poet (and from the collection of poems it is a part of) but it's also true that the source of all poetry is ultimately to be located within the poet's own self. A poet may take on voices, 'speak from depths [they] do not understand', but ultimately they draw on resources from within (8). Separating the myth of Plath from her creative works has always been a tentative task, and never more so than in discussing Plath in relation to self-injury. Plath was certainly not a self-injurer in the sense of repetitive and consistent acts of self-inflicted harm, but she did frequently engage in self-injurious behaviour.

Wherever images of destruction to the body occur in Plath's poetry, and they do so practically every other page in her collected poems, there also occurs an expression of having lost an unnameable something. In Three Women it is a direct question 'What is it I miss?/ Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?' placed amongst images of a passive body, bleeding 'white as wax', of the self as a bandaged wound and, most strikingly, of life being stitched onto the body by the speaker (9). There is also the familiar reversal of the creative and destructive, the setting a maternity ward, the prominent theme the diseased and dying self, and the prominent sentiment the alienation of 'I'.

Though images of self-harm, and the desire for that harm, persist within the poems' forceful and candid language; the self is always passively under threat of annihilation from others. However, often the other which the self is under threat from is more ambiguous than is first apparent, dividing lines blur and the antagonist morphs the more the poem is read. Even in Daddy the speaker who equates to the Jewish victim, her 'pretty red heart' bit in two, is herself murderous. The Other utilises simple diction and couplets, and yet it's Plath at her knottiest, one group of threads untangling only to twist into another. The other of the title is ambiguous (cat-like it may even be the speaker herself) though this is essentially unimportant, it's threatening presence and the reaction it provokes from the speaker is blatant.

Cold glass, how you insert yourself

Between myself and myself.
I scratch like a cat.

The blood that runs is dark fruit - An effect, a cosmetic.

You smile.
. (10)

Yet whilst the reaction is blatant, just whom the speaker is directing her violence against is not clear. It could be directed towards the ambiguous other, but the preceding line suggests it is against herself. The blood's description as 'cosmetic' is interesting as it suggests the speaker is experiencing a sense of unreality. This sense of detachment is another common sensory experience reported by self-injurers. The poem ends with an enigmatic darkness, the reader being left with the other's self-satisfied smile: is the other smiling because he already knew the speaker's act was not fatal, or does that smile fade on the reception of that knowledge? It is a haunting, and strangely apt description of the emotional response to an act of self-harm.

It is crucial to note that the 'I' within Plath's poetry locates herself not through identification with, but its distinctness from all outside the self - the ambivalent other, that however mundane (sheep or tulips for example) her self willingly dissolves before. In A Birthday Present there is a contented beauty, a willed conclusion, to the final image - where once again creation and destruction are confused.

There would be nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side. (11)

The 'I' of Plath's poetry calls harm upon herself, but the harm called is couched in language that suggests its healing and creative nature. In A Birthday Present the knife cuts as an act of cosmic birth, it is a 'pure' act with 'nobility' as in Lady Lazarus where the suicide rises in the famous phoenix image. This inversion of creative and destructive acts was a common theme in Plath's friend and rival Anne Sexton's work, another poet whose work abounds with images of self-harm. The line on which the whole of the brilliantly succinct Wanting to Die, a poem that offers an explanation of that unnameable lust for death, turns is 'Like carpenters they want to know which tools./ They never ask why build'. Carpentry an act of creation, an invitation to experience the inverted world of Thanatos so casually and artfully evoked by Sexton's poem.

It is important to touch upon Sexton's work, which displays a preoccupation with communicating the incomprehensible and showing the reader their own dark reflection in the mirror of inadequate words. Frequently words, counter posed against some image of silence, emerge from a mouth imaged as a wound. In As it was written the moon 'falls out of the sky each night,/ with its hungry red mouth/ to suck at my scars' bears witness to a Plath-like passive devouring, but also has further power when viewed in line with similar images from Sexton's works. The kiss in the poem of that title may imbue the speaker with new life, but it is a fragile life darkly intertwined with the coming presence of harm as illustrated through the juxtaposing of the first and last lines.

My mouth blooms like a cut.

...Where there was silence
the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.
Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped
into fire. (12)

The presence of 'incurably' is partly responsible for the resonance of 'fire', which seems to consume negatively rather than remain a passive image of warmth, growth and life. The precision of Sexton's diction demands the careful attention of a reader, often inviting fuller understanding of irrational drives but only after twisting and nauseously inverting traditional polarities. The poem Wanting to Die, as already mentioned, is the clearest example of this but of more relevance is the association of words and blood. Silence is associated with death in The Silence, poetry with life, but words communicate through a destructive image the poet 'filling the room/ with the words from my pen./ Words leak out of it like a miscarriage'. In Alvarez' study of suicide The Savage God the author makes a passing reference to Dante's placing of 'the violent against themselves' in Circle 7 of The Inferno (13). What is interesting is that here also words and blood are associated; the souls encased in trees are fed upon by the Harpies and from their wounds come words and blood together. Only as long as the blood flows may the souls speak. It is an extremely complex, self-perpetuating association of ideas and concepts found in much of the literature relevant to this study. Sexton's and Plath's understanding of the creative influence exemplified in their works echoes Michael Backunin's famous assertion 'The passion for destruction is also a creative passion' (14). The desire to communicate on one level and the need to re-create the self are inextricably tied to self-injury ideations; and are equally essential for many of the more recent confessional poets. If Sexton and Plath never consciously classified themselves as self-injurers, then they were certainly aware of its concept at a primitive and perceptive level.

Plath's poem Cut does not describe a deliberate act of self-harm, but it does describe an emotional reaction to an accidental injury, which mirrors a self-injurer's. The poem describes an unhealthy sequence of emotional progression in the immediate aftermath of an injury: The initial detached excitement at successfully causing harm, the dark humour welling up to threaten the temporary delight and the intensifying sense of self-disgust. This analysis explores the poem specifically in relation to the concept of self-injury and how the poem shows a remarkable understanding of it. This understanding accesses fundamental, regressive emotions, which are given (consciously by the poet) impetus through the accompanying images drawn from history.

The opening approaches the injury with the unseemly frivolity of a self-injurer - who places the emotional release of the act above the danger of physical harm. 'What a thrill - / My thumb instead of an onion' is shocking because of its colloquial phrasing, expressing an inappropriate reaction to injury and because it is initially an amusing image. The reader is thus immediately caught out and made to feel a guilt, which intensifies their emotional involvement. It pre-figures the inevitable and motherly chastisement the speaker offers herself at the poem's conclusion - 'Dirty girl'.

The poem performs a cinematic zoom, personifying the blood with a disquieting fascination. It is a readily identifiable reaction, accounting for it's unsettling quality, the shocked and fascinated detachment at the sight of blood. Rudolf Steiner specifically explores the significance of the blood to Plath in this poem, suggesting a number of useful points (15). Steiner posits the blood is the contact point between the self and the outer world, and the injury a testing of that barrier by the self - the very same idea explored from a psychological standpoint by Favazza (16). The images of ancestral conflict - Indian and pilgrim, the War of Independence, the Kamikaze pilots of the Second World War and the racial war suggested by the Ku Klux Klan - all place the emphasis on antagonistic meetings. Meetings where each party perceives the other as fundamentally different and opposed to their beliefs; boundaries that cannot be crossed. For the self sealed-off speaker this testing is akin to the pilgrims' tentative colonisation; their subsequent scalping by the hostile natives a commentary on the rejection of the speaker by the outer world and the outer world by the speaker. Interestingly Joyce Carol Oates' poem Passing an Afternoon has a similar exploration of the meeting of self and other through the resulting blood from an act of self-harm, except in this case the self is united with its physical surroundings through the apparent kinship of blood and water. For both poets the physical sensation is deceptively transformative, in that the initial fascination gives way to self-negation.

Blood transforms the warm bath water
and, in it, I see weakly
that this was a mistake.
The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless
the blood rushes out happily in the warm
water as if kin to it, the same
tender substance.

Rising
a new person
transformed with an icy
sense of error
... (17)

As in Oates poem where the sight of the blood initiates self-chastisement, Plath's poem turns on the microcosmic metaphor of the blood as soldiers, with the immediate sensory experience being quickly overridden by self-analysis. The temporary relief is part of a destructive circle, intended to turn thoughts outward they return inward with greater repulsion. The questioning of the soldier's allegiance indicates the doubt of the self's motivation in finding the act a cause for 'Celebration': the crude 'pink fizz' suggesting the tawdry nature of the pleasure. The emotional undulations of this section reach the self-destructive heart of self-injury, that the act may offer temporary relief but ultimately only serves to re-focus and intensify the exploration of negative thoughts.

In the next stanza the thumb stump seems to become the addressed. It is distanced from the speaker's self, and predictably, becomes the other that the self must distance itself from. The formerly celebrated wound and thumb, assume a masculine identity, an identity innately negative in Plath's poetry. Reduced to a lifeless manikin, it is blamed as a 'saboteu'r, possibly of the former pleasurable response. The masochistic quality has clearly been recognised and this is followed by a powerfully bitter set of allusions building into the closing rebuke.

Saboteur,
Kamikaze man-

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes...

However there is a similar uncertainty in the closing emotional resonance, similar to that in Tulips, the poem refusing to fix itself to a set of definite qualities. The thumb stump is both a lifeless manikin and an animated replica of a Russian peasant wrapped in its' gauze like a scarf. The ultimate rebuke is not as strong as the preceding images suggest it should be, it is a pat on the back of the hand and suggests the rebellious smirk of the opening half of the poem. It is a refusal to renounce that part of the ego which, took a guilty pleasure in the accident, the scolded child who will play with matches despite and perhaps because she knows better. It is the emotional crucible every self-harmer knows all too well.

As already stated this analysis is not intended to psychoanalyse or diagnose Plath, rather to locate within her poetry themes, trends and concepts that relate to self-injury. Even if Plath had no conception of self-injury, Cut has found new cultural significance among the modern SI community. More importantly it makes the motivations behind self-injury accessible at a basic level. The poem, and this is also true of her poetry generally, is disturbing because it calls forth in the reader regressive fantasies we reject in daily life. The experience can feel almost cathartic, the purging of emotions which though we recognise as accurately evoked by Plath, we also recognise as flawed. The speaker of Plath's poetry verbalises the most atavistic, engrained desires, desires of an identity which feels confusingly out of place in its' surroundings. Plath's poetry so often criticised for its self-conscious and circular explorations of a limited ego, is culturally relevant because of this - rarely do people view themselves as integrated within the universe they inhabit. The definition of 'I' occurs when the self is perceived as distinct to all that surrounds it. Plath's poetry is a socially committed art because Plath accesses a world which most reject, but all can identify with. For the SI community Plath's poetry inhabits a world where the most elusive of feelings are allowed to be just that, but coaxed into the cathartic form of words.

Blood

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:44:12 GMT

Blood and the customs that surround it have always been able to conjure powerful emotions because of its psychological and symbolic resonance. Blood bonds and pacts were a primitive method of drawing upon the blood's ability to foster loyalty and union amongst members of a social network. There is an intrinsic communicative power in the symbolism of blood; it is able to express without the requirement of frequently inadequate words the concept of suffering. The communicative function of self-injury has been noted both by psychologists and authors alike; the latter often more profitably than the former due to the natural polarity formed between literature as primarily a linguistically based medium, though aware of its own limitations in language and the concept of self-injury as somehow transcending verbal expression, though equally aware of its own inadequacies. Speech, and by connection language, represents a direct method of externalising the internal self in the world it finds itself surrounded by and similarly the letting of blood symbolically represents the crossing of the self's life into that external world: the boundary of skin being broken so self and other can be reconciled. This breaking of boundary between self and world is symbolically a restorative act, primitive and lately conceived of as unconscious, these symbolic pacts are sealed in the emotive form of blood and often a transitory appeasement of the self which perceives itself at odds with its world.

I destroy my mouth to regain the power of speech

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:43:31 GMT

One of the most important elements to recognise, not merely because it expatiates any misunderstandings but because it is the most notoriously drawn upon by relevant writers, is that superficial self-injurers do not harm themselves arbitrarily. They consistently report a relief of symptoms, however temporarily, such as anxiety, guilt and depression. Favazza discusses the most common sensations experienced by self-injurers but summarises these as follows: 'They deliberately harm themselves to feel better, to get rapid respite from distressing thoughts and emotions, and to regain a sense of self-control' (4). To self-injurers the act is far from destructive, as it actually is, it is rather a form a self-healing and an act closer to creative than destructive. Myths of creation have the common theme of the world being created through some sacrifice and some mutilation of a primordial being. In the Scandinavian Prose Edda the giant Ymir was mutilated by the gods to form the world - his blood becoming the seas and lakes, his flesh the earth, his bones the mountains, his skull the sky and his teeth the rocks (5). The body in creation mythology becomes a microcosm of the vaster cosmos, self-injury can represent a re-enactment of these myths were chaos is subdued beneath a new order born of sacrifice (6). Mutilation in Scandinavian mythology is even more common than other cultures, with various gods mutilating themselves to gain some poetically appropriate advantage. For example the god Loki destroyed his mouth to regain the power of speech and Odin sacrificed his eye to gain otherworldly sight. This was a theme that J.R.R Tolkein, who was greatly influenced by Scandinavian and Norse mythology, used frequently in The Silmarillion - his creation myth for Middle Earth. Some injury is usually the catalyst for greater power and wisdom, the elf Maedhros for example, who loses his hand 'lived to wield his sword with left hand more deadly than his right had been' (7). The gaining of power from self-injury is actively practiced in Shamanism where it is used as a stepping-stone in the development of the capacity to heal oneself a belief, which finds its western equivalent in the practice of blood letting as a medical cure for a variety of diseases.

Flagellant cults and limb amputation

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:42:17 GMT

Though this study is primarily occurred with self-injury (SI) in literature post 1960, it is important to recognise self-injury's place in humanity's cultural and historical heritage. Mutilative images are central to many disparate religions and biblical literature is a disturbingly rich tapestry of such images, including the central iconography of Christ's passion where sacrifice, suffering and redemption are crucial. The fourteenth century saw the rise of the flagellant cults and sixteenth century reformation art, such a Lucas Cranach's, clearly drew on these ideas. Major acts of self-injury, a definition that describes infrequent acts where body tissue is significantly destroyed - for example limb amputation; have been reportedly motivated by Matthew 18 (2). 'Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet and to be cast into everlasting fire'. The bible also provides us with one of the first recorded incidents of stereotypical and superficial self-injury (3). 'Legion' a man with 'an unclean spirit' is described in Mark 5 as 'always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying and cutting himself with stones'. What is important, and startling at first to notice, is the concurrence between modern reports from self-injurers and these biblical references. Legion - 'we are many' - a man with no stable sense of self, exiled from a society that fears him and his suffering; Christ, whose bodily suffering is described so vividly in the scriptures, expiating perceived sins with the letting of blood; the survival of these similarities suggests an inherent and persistent disorder. The root of this disorder remains obscure, though through the relevant literature of the last decades it is possible to identify a careful and fruitful exploration, which results not only in deepening our understanding of the disorder but also of just why it appears to be an inherent element of our psychological make-up.

Quod me nutrit me distruit

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:40:13 GMT

Self-injury is one of society's most unusual taboos. Unusual not being applied to the act itself, but with regards its status as a taboo. It is most certainly not an uncommon activity - an estimated one in every 130 people are active self-injurers. Nor is it difficult to find culturally sanctioned parallels - tattoos and body-piercing - or more acceptable self-injurious behaviour: smoking and alcoholism to name but a couple. Perhaps many find the concept disturbing because they perceive it, mistakenly, as a new phenomenon. This belief is enhanced by the topic's proliferation within popular culture, spear-headed by music groups , whose lyrics speak of 'dignity in self-abuse' and celebrities such as Angelina Jolie: an outspoken self-injurer who has the Latin 'quod me nutrit me distruit' (what nourishes me also destroys me) tattooed across her abdomen. Indeed though pop culture rarely carries much kudos with the intellectual establishment; the topic's acceptance amongst these creative artists has meant their work often displays a real appreciation, however crudely, of self-injury's cultural and historical roots. Although self-injury has a marked presence in some of the earliest literature, it is only recently, with the impetus of popular culture, new approaches to psychiatry and time in the loosest sense have the works begun to emerge, which treat the subject with a liberal creativity.

Let wound be my word

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 09:38:14 GMT

Self-injury: the commission of deliberate harm to one's own body. The injury is done to oneself, without the aid of another person, and the injury is severe enough for tissue damage (such as scarring) to result. Acts that are committed with conscious suicidal intent or are associated with sexual arousal are excluded.

Adventure of Self-Discovery...

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 03:18:58 GMT

Dr. Stanislav Grof's methods of spiritual exploration and healing with psychedelic sacraments were extremely simple, and simply extreme. The client was given a very high dose of the sacrament, and virtually no external stimuli other than music. The facilitator / coach / healer took a smaller dose, and the session proceeded typically for about 8 hours.

The appropriate image is probably that of the Zen proverb of a young goose placed in a bottle; it grows too big to escape - how will the adept get it out, without smashing the bottle or damaging the goose? Well, it seems he just has to feed it until it gets big enough to burst out. Grof's method is a pressure-vessel of psychonautic transformation, that which happens being entirely dependent on the myth-making capacity of the client.

I and a good friend did a series of sessions using LSD with this type of methodology a few years ago. Our goals were deep emotional healing and transpersonal ecstasy. In addition to the series of six sessions, we did work between sessions in order to:

* integrate the unconscious material that came up, using breathwork;
* work on positive attitude to changes,
* look at attitudes and beliefs that may get in the way of healing and change them using cognitive techniques such as affirmations.

Grof's model works as follows: he started out with no particular structural presuppositions, but over thousands of sessions with clients he concluded that this work reveals what he calls condensed experience or 'COEX systems'. These are what NLP Timeline practitioners sometimes call gestalts, associated chains of emotional reactions that extend from the present back along a track of the same response, right back to the imprint that generated the knot in the first place. Again, like timeline workers, Grof accepts the (at least subjective and therefore useful) reality of past lives and ancestral memory traces.

Grof further notes that the profoundest and most universal COEXs he observes are what he calls Basic Perinatal Matrices, or BPMs. He observes these appearing at the interface between personal and transpersonal states of consciousness. In other words, they are the patterns left by traumas around and during one's own birth. These imprints gather massive chains of reactions around them, enormous and all-pervasive COEX's, that dominate the client's life until the opportunity comes to completely re-experience and re-imprint these primal, pre-verbal levels of foetal and post-foetal consciousness. Once this is achieved, the client goes into transpersonal ecstasy.

A very brief summary of the 4 BPM's that Grof identifies:-

* BPM 1: The foetus is in the womb before the start of the birth process. The world is radiant, safe, nourishing. Associated win later life with oneness & belonging, divine play to which one can surrender with full trust. The negative side is: Psychotic distortion; dissolution of boundaries which is confusing & threatening. One may feel endangered, under attack by demonic forces, often poisoned. Uncertainty and paranoia everywhere.
* BPM 2 starts when the birth contractions begin, when there is pressure on the foetus but no chance of release. The beginning phase is similar to negative BPM1, disruption of the intrauterine paradise, but with a sense of mechanical entrapment and claustrophobia. Full BPM 2 is a feeling of no exit, of hell, of a world hopeless, full of meaningless suffering. The adult may feel deeply guilty and identify with role of helpless victim.
* BPM 3 starts when contractions are still occurring, but the birth canal is now opens. Titanic forces squash the head and body. This feels like (and is) a life-death struggle, great emotional & physical tension. The pattern in later life is of problems with control of self-/ destructive impulses. Cruel fantasies, sexual disturbances, preoccupation with demonic, perverted or scatalogical themes. The world is a dangerous place, an existential battlefield ruled by the law of the jungle where one has to be strong to survive and get one's needs.
* BPM 4 is the release, the death-rebirth experience. If uncomplicated, then gives rise to feelings of physical & spiritual rebirth, rejuvenation, emotional renewal. Full of excitement and energy, yet centred and peaceful, perceives the world as though through cleansed senses. Added zest for life.

This will only sting for a moment!

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 02:37:08 GMT

Strategy of the real

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 01:27:00 GMT

Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here.

For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated hold up than to a real one? For a real hold up only upsets the order of things, the right of property, whereas a simulated hold up interferes with the very principle of reality. Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation.

But the difficulty is in proportion to the peril. How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs mclme neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.

Go and organize a fake hold up. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger (otherwise you risk committing an offence). Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible. In brief, stay close to the "truth", so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of art)ficial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to you). In brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality: that's exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play.

In this impossibility of isolating the process of simulation must be seen the whole thrust of an order that can only see and understand m terms of some reality, because it can function nowhere else. The simulation of an offence, if it is patent, will either be punished more lightly (because it has no "consequences") or be punished as an offence to public office (for example, if one triggered off a police operation "for nothing") - but never as simulation, since it is precisely as such that no equivalence with the real is possible, and hence no repression either. The challenge of simulation is irreceivable by power. How can you punish the simulation of virtue? Yet as such it is as serious as the simulation of crime. Parody makes obedience and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, since it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based. The established order can do nothing against it, for the law is a second-order simulacrum whereas simulation is a third-order simulacrum, beyond true and false, beyond equivalences, beyond the rational distmctions upon which function all power and the entire social stratum. Hence, failing the real, it is here that we must aim at order.

This is why order always opts for the real. In a state of uncertainty, It always prefers this assumption (thus in the army they would rather take the simulator as a true madman). But this becomes more and more difficult, for it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation; through the force of inertia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is also true (and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus of simulation and of power's impotency): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.

Thus all hold ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation hold ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible consequences. In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their "real" goal at all. But this does not make them inoffensive. On the contrary, it is as hyperreal events, no longer having any particular contents or aims, but indefinitely refracted by each other (for that matter like so-called historical events: strikes, demonstrations, crises, etc.5), that they are precisely unverifiable by an order which can only exert itself on the real and the rational, on ends and means: a referential order which can only dominate referentials, a determinate power which can only dominate a determined world, but which can do nothing about that indefinite recurrence of simulation, about that weightless nebula no longer obeying the law of gravitation of the real - power itself eventually breaking apart in this space and becomnig a simulation of power (disconnected from its aims and objectives, and dedicated to power effects and mass simulation).

The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production. For that purpose it prefers the discourse of crisis, but also - why not? - the discourse of desire. "Take your desires for reality!" can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power, for in a nonreferential world even the confusian of the reality principle with the desire principle is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality. One remains among principles, and there power is always right.

Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective; they turn against power this deterrence which is so well utilized for a long time itself. For, finally, it was capital which was the first to feed throughout its history on the destruction of every referential, of every human goal, which shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange, the iron law of its power. It was the first to practice deterrence, abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization, etc.; and if it was capital which fostered reality, the reality principle, it was also the first to liquidate it in the extermination of every use value, of every real equivalence, of production and wealth, in the very sensation we have of the unreality of the stakes and the omnipotence of manipulation. Now, it is this very logic which is today hardened even more against it. And when it wants to fight this catastrophic spiral by secreting one last glimmer of reality, on which to found one last glimmer of power, it only multiplies the signs and accelerates the play of simulation.

As long as it was historically threatened by the real, power risked deterrence and simulation, disintegrating every contradiction by means of the production of equivalent signs. When it is threatened today by simulation (the threat of vanishing in the play of signs), power risks the real, risks crisis, it gambles on remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, -political stakes. This is a question of life or death for it. But it is too late.

Whence the characteristic hysteria of our time: the hysteria of production and reproduction of the real. The other production, that of goods and commodities, that of la belle epoque of political economy, no longer makes any sense of its own, and has not for some time. What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary "material" production is itself hyperreal. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is nothing more than its scaled-down refraction (thus the hyperrealists fasten in a striking resemblance a real from which has fled all meaning and charm, all the profundity and energy of representation). Thus the hyperrealism of simulation is expressed everywhere by the real's striking resemblance to itself.

Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power - a holy union which forms around the disappearance of power. Everybody belongs to it more or less in fear of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power comes down to nothing more than the critical obsession with power: an obsession with its death; an obsession with its survival which becomes greater the more it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, logically we will be under the total spell of power - a haunting memory already foreshadowed everywhere, manifesting at one and the same time the satisfaction of having got rid of it (nobody wants it any more, everybody unloads it on others) and grieving its loss. Melancholy for societies without power: this has already given rise to fascism, that overdose of a powerful referential in a society which cannot terminate its mourning.

But we are still in the same boat: none of our societies know how to manage their mourning for the real, for power, for the social itself, which is implicated in this same breakdown. And it is by an art)ficial revitalization of all this that we try to escape it. Undoubtedly this will even end up in socialism. By an unforeseen twist of events and an irony which no longer belongs to history, it is through the death of the social that socialism will emerge - as it is through the death of God that religions emerge. A twisted coming, a perverse event, an unintelligible reversion to the logic of reason. As is the fact that power is no longer present except to conceal that there is none. A simulation which can go on indefinitely, since -unlike "true" power which is, or was, a structure, a strategy, a relation of force, a stake - this is nothing but the object of a social demand, and hence subject to the law of supply and demand, rather than to violence and death. Completely expunged from the political dimension, it is dependent, like any other commodity, on production and mass consumption. Its spark has disappeared; only the fiction of a political universe is saved.

Likewise with work. The spark of production, the violence of its stake no longer exists. Everybody still produces, and more and more, but work has subtly become something else: a need (as Marx ideally envisaged it, but not at all in the same sense), the object of a social "demand," like leisure, to which it is equivalent in the general run of life's options. A demand exactly proportional to the loss of stake in the work process.6 The same change in fortune as for power: the scenario of work is there to conceal the fact that the work-real, the production-real, has disappeared. And for that matter so has the strike-real too, which is no longer a stoppage of work, but its alternative pole in the ritual scansion of the social calendar. It is as if everyone has "occupied" their work place or work post, after declaring the strike, and resumed production, as is the custom in a "self-managed" job, in exactly the same terms as before, by declaring themselves (and virtually being) in a state of permanent strike.

This isn't a science-fiction dream: everywhere it is a question of a doubling of the work process. And of a double or locum for the strike process - strikes which are incorporated like obsolescence in objects, like crises in production. Then there are no longer any strikes or work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something else entirely: a wizardry of work, a trompe l'oeil, a scenodrama (not to say melodrama) of production, collective dramaturgy upon the empty stage of the social.

It is no longer a question of the ideology of work - of the traditional ethic that obscures the "real" labour process and the "objective" process of exploitation- but of the scenario of work. Likewise, it is no longer a question of the ideology of power, but of the scenario of power. Ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its reduplication by signs. It is always the aim of ideological analysis to restore the objective process; it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.

This is ultimately why power is so in accord with ideological discourses and discourses on ideology, for these are all discourses of truth - always good, even and especially if they are revolutionary, to counter the mortal blows of simulation.

Notes

1 Counterfeit and reproduction imply always an anguish, a disquieting foreignness: the uneasiness before the photograph, considered like a witch's trick - and more generally before any technical apparatus, which is always an apparatus of reproduction, is related by Benjamin to the uneasiness before the mirror-image. There is already sorcery at work in the mirror. But how much more so when this image can be detached from the mirror and be transported, stocked, reproduced at will (cf. The Student of Prague, where the devil detaches the image of the student from the mirror and harrasses him to death by the intermediary of this image). All reproduction implies therefore a kind of black magic, from the fact of being seduced by one's own image in the water, like Narcissus, to being haunted by the double and, who knows, to the mortal turning back of this vast technical apparatus secreted today by man as his own image (the narcissistic mirage of technique, McLuhan) and that returns to him, cancelled and distorted -endless reproduction of himself and his power to the limits of the world. Reproduction is diabolical in its very essence; it makes something fundamental vacillate. This has hardly changed for us: simulation (that we describe here as the operation of the code) is still and always the place of a gigantic enterprise of manipulation, of control and of death, just like the imitative object (primitive statuette, image of photo) always had as objective an operation of black image.

2 There is furthermore in Monod's book a flagrant contradiction, which reflects the ambiguity of all current science. His discourse concerns the code, that is the third-order simulacra, but it does so still according to "scientific" schemes of the second-order - objectiveness, "scientific" ethic of knowledge, science's principle of truth and transcendence. All things incompatible with the indeterminable models of the third-order.

3 "It's the feeble 'definition' of TV which condemns its spectator to rearranging the few points retained into a kind of abstract work. He participates suddenly in the creation of a reality that was only just presented to him in dots: the television watcher is in the position of an individual who is asked to project his own fantasies on inkblots that are not supposed to represent anything." TV as perpetual Rorshach test. And furthermore: "The TV image requires each instant that we 'close' the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile."

4 "The Medium is the Message" is the very slogan of the political economy of the sign, when it enters into the third-order simulation - the distinction between the medium and the message characterizes instead signification of the second-order.

5 The entire current "psychological" situation is characterized by this shortcircuit.

Doesn't emancipation of children and teenagers, once the initial phase of revolt is passed and once there has been established the principle of the right to emancipation, seem like the real emancipation of parents. And the young (students, high-schoolers, adolescents) seem to sense it in their always more insistent demand (though still as paradoxical) for the presence and advice of parents or of teachers. Alone at last, free and responsible, it seemed to them suddenly that other people possibly have absconded with their true liberty. Therefore, there is no question of "leaving them be." They're going to hassle them, not with any emotional or material spontaneous demand, but with an exigency that has been premeditated and corrected by an implicit oedipal knowledge. Hyperdependence (much greater than before) distored by irony and refusal, parody of libidinous original mechanisms. Demand without content, without referent, unjust)fied, but for all that all the more severe - naked demand with no possible answer. The contents of knowledge (teaching) or of affective relations, the pedagogical or familial referent having been eliminated in the act of emancipation, there remains only a demand linked to the empty form of the institution- perverse demand, and for that reason all the more obstinate. "Transferable" desire (that is to say non-referential, un-referential), desire that has been fed by lack, by the place left vacant, "liberated," desire captured in its own vertiginous image, desire of desire, as pure form, hyperreal. Deprived of symbolic substance, it doubles back upon itself, draws its energy from its own reflection and its disappointment with itself. This is literally today the "demand," and it is obvious that unlike the "classical" objective or transferable relations this one here is insoluble and interminable.

Simulated Oedipus.

Francois Richard: "Students asked to be seduced either bodily or verbally. But also they are aware of this and they play the game, ironically. 'Give us your knowledge, your presence, you have the word, speak, you are there for that.' Contestation certainly, but not only: the more authority is contested, vilified, the greater the need for authority as such. They play at Oedipus also, to deny it all the more vehemently. The 'teach', he's Daddy, they say; it's fun, you play at incest, malaise, the untouchable, at being a tease - in order to de-sexualize finally." Like one under analysis who asks for Oedipus back again, who tells the "oedipal" stories, who has the "analytical" dreams to satisfy the supposed request of the analyst, or to resist him? In the same way the student goes through his oedipal number, his seduction number, gets chummy, close, approaches, dominates- but this isn't desire, it's simulation. Oedipal psychodrama of simulation (neither less real nor less dramatic for all that). Very different from the real libidinal stakes of knowledge and power or even of a real mourning for the absence of same (as could have happened after 1968 in the universities). Now we've reached the phase of desperate reproduction, and where the stakes are nil, the simulacrum is maximal - exacerbated and parodied simulation at one and the same time- as interminable as psychoanalysis and for the same reasons.

The interminable psychoanalysis.

There is a whole chapter to add to the history of transference and countertransference: that of their liquidation by simulation, of the impossible psychoanalysis because it is itself, from now on, that produces and reproduces the unconscious as its institutional substance. Psychoanalysis dies also of the exchange of the signs of the unconscious. Just as revolution dies of the exchange of the critical signs of political economy. This short-circuit was well known to Freud in the form of the gift of the analytic dream, or with the "uninformed" patients, in the form of the gift of their analytic knowledge. But this was still interpreted as resistance, as detour, and did not put fundamentally into question either the process of analysis or the principle of transference. It is another thing entirely when the unconscious itself, the discourse of the unconscious becomes unfindable - according to the same scenario of simulative anticipation that we have seen at work on all levels with the machines of the third order. The analysis then can no longer end, it becomes logically and historically interminable, since it stabilizes on a puppetsubstance of reproduction, an unconscious programmed on demand - an impossible-to-break-through point around which the whole analysis is rearranged. The messages of the unconscious have been short-circuited by the psychoanalysis "medium." This is libidinal hyperrealism. To the famous categories of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, it is going to be necessary to add the hyperreal, which captures and obstructs the functioning of the three orders.

6 Athenian democracy, much more advanced than our own, had reached the point where the vote was considered as payment for a service, after all other repressive solutions had been tried and found wanting in order to insure a quorum.

Moebius: spiralling negativity

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 01:25:00 GMT

Hence Watergate was only a trap set by the system to catch its adversaries - a simulation of scandal to regenerative ends. This is embodied by the character called "Deep Throat," who was said to be a Republican grey eminence manipulating the leftist journalists in order to get rid of Nixon - and why not? All hypotheses are possible, although this one is superfluous: the work of the Right is done very well, and spontaneously, by the Left on its own. Besides, it would be naive to see an embittered good conscience at work here. For the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of the Left. All the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another; where there is no longer any active or passive. It is by putting an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle of political reality can be saved. It is by the simulation of a conventional, restricted perspective field, where the premises and consequences of any act or event are calculable, that a political credibility can be maintained (including, of course, "objective" analysis, struggle, etc.) But if the entire cycle of any act or event is envisaged in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, then all determination evaporates, every act terminates at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and been scattered in all directions.

Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof- indeed the objectivity of the fact- does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all models around the merest fact- the models come first, and their orbital (like the bomb) circulation constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events. Facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of the models; a single fact may even be engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity or implosion of poles) is what each time allows for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory - all are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle.

The communists attack the socialist party as though they wanted to shatter the union of the Left. They sanction the idea that their reticence stems from a more radical political exigency. In fact, it is because they don't want power. But do they not want it at this conjuncture because it is unfavorable for the Left in general, or because it is unfavorable for them within the union of the Left - or do they not want it by definition? When Berlinguer declares, "We mustn't be frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy," this means simultaneously:

1 That there is nothing to fear, since the communists, if they come to power, will change nothing in its fundamental capitalist mechanism.

2 That there isn't any risk of their ever coming to power (for the reason that they don't want to); and even if they do take it up, they will only ever wield it by proxy.

3 That in fact power, genuine power, no longer exists, and hence there is no risk of anybody seizing it or taking it over.

4 But more: 1, Berlinguer, am not frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy - which might appear evident, but not so evident, since:

5 It can also mean the contrary (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am frightened of seeing the communists seize power (and with good reason, even for a communist).

All the above is simultaneously true. This is the secret of a discourse that is no longer only ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determinate position of power, the impossibility of a determinate position of discourse. And this logic belongs to neither party. It traverses all discourses without their wanting it.

Who will unravel this imbroglio? The Gordian knot can at least be cut. As for the Moebius strip, if it is split in two, it results in an additional spiral without there being any possibility of resolving its surfaces (here the reversible continuity of hypotheses). Hades of simulation, which is no longer one of torture, but of the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning4 - where even those condemned at Burgos are still a gik from Franco to Western democracy, which finds m them the occasion to regenerate its own flagging humamsm, and whose indignant protestation consolidates in return Franco's regime by uniting the Spanish masses against foreign intervention? Where is the truth in all that, when such collusions admirably knit together without their authors even knowing it?

The conjunction of the system and its extreme alternative like two ends of a curved mirror, the "vicious" curvature of a political space henceforth magnetized, circularized, reversibilized from right to lek a torsion that is like the evil demon of commutation, the whole system, the infinity of capital folded back over its own sur&ce: transfinite? And isn't it the same with desire and libidinal space? The conjunction of desire and value, of desire and capital. The conjunction of desire and the law; the ultimate joy and metamorphosis of the law (which is why it is so well received at the moment): only capital takes pleasure, Lyotard said, before coming to think that we take pleasure in capital. Overwhelming versatility of desire in Deleuze: an enigmatic reversal which brings this desire that is "revolutionary by itself, and as if involuntarily, in wanting what it wants," to want its own repression and to invest paranoid and fascist systems? A malign torsion which reduces this revolution of desire to the same fundamental ambiguity as the other, historical revolution.

All the referentials intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian compulsion. Not so long ago sex and work were savagely opposed terms: today both are dissolved into the same type of demand. Formerly the discourse on history took its force from opposing itself to the one on nature, the discourse on desire to the one on power: today they exchange their signifiers and their scenarios.

It would take too long to run through the whole range of operational negativity, of all those scenarios of deterrence which, like Watergate, try to revive a moribund principle by simulated scandal, phantasm, murder - a sort of hormonal treatment by negativity and crisis. It is always a question of proving the real by the imaginary; proving truth by scandal; proving the law by transgression; proving work by the strike; proving the system by crisis and capital by revolution; and for that matter proving ethnology by the dispossession of its object (the Tasaday). Without counting: proving theater by anti-theater; proving art by anti-art; proving pedagogy by anti-pedagogy; proving psychiatry by anti-psychiatry, etc., etc.

Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form. Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial, in order to attempt to escape, by simulation of death, its real agony. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy. Thus with the American presidents: the Kennedys are murdered because they still have a political dimension. Others - Johnson, Nixon, Ford - only had a right to puppet attempts, to simulated murders. But they nevertheless needed that aura of an art)ficial menace to conceal that they were nothing other than mannequins of power. In olden days the king (also the god) had to die - that was his strength. Today he does his miserable utmost to pretend to die, so as to preserve the blessing of power. But even this is gone.

To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle by the mirror of crisis, negativity and anti-power: this is the only alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious circle of its irresponsibility and its fundamental nonexistence, of its deja-vu and its deja-mort.

Political incantation

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 01:23:43 GMT

Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the art)ficial perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists). Same operation, though this time tending towards scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress.

The denunciation of scandal always pays homage to the law. And Watergate above all succeeded in imposing the idea that Watergate was a scandal - in this sense it was an extraordinary operation of intoxication: the reinjection of a large dose of political morality on a global scale. It could be said along with Bourdieu that: "The specific character of every relation of force is to dissimulate itself as such, and to acquire all its force only because it is so dissimulated"; understood as follows: capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever regenerates this public mocality (by indignation, denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the; order of capital, as did the Washington Post journalists.

But this is still only the formula of ideology, and when Bourdieu enunciates it, he takes "relation of force" to mean the truth of capitalist domination, and he denounces this relation of force as itself a scandal: he therefore occupies the same deterministic and moralistic position as the Washington Post journalists. He does the same job of purging and revivihg moral order, an order of truth wherein the genuine symbolic violence of the social order is engendered, well beyond all relations of force, which are only elements of its indifferent and shifting configuration in the moral and political consciousnesses of people.

All that capital asks of us is to receive it as rational or to combat it in the name of rationality, to receive it as moral or to combat it in the name of morality. For they are identical, meaning they can be read another way: before, the task was to dissimulate scandal; today, the task is to conceal the fact that there is none.

Watergate is not a scandal: this is- what must be said at all cost, for this is what everyone is concerned to conceal, this dissimulation masking a strengthening of morality, a moral panic as we approach the primal (mise-en-)scene of capital: its instantaneous cruelty; its incomprehensible ferocity; its fundamental immorality - these are what are scandalous, unaccountable for in that system of moral and economic equivalence which remains the axiom of leftist thought, from Enlightenment theory to communism. Capital doesn't give a damn about the idea of the contract which is imputed to it: it is a monstrous unprincipled undertaking, nothing more. Rather, it is "enlightened" thought which seeks to control capital by imposing rules on it. And all that recrimination which replaced revolutionary thought today comes down to reproaching capital for not following the rules of the game. "Power is unjust; its justice is a class justice; capital exploits us; etc." - as if capital were linked by a contract to the society it rules. It is the left which holds out the mirror of equivalence, hoping that capital will fall for this phantasmagoria of the social contract and furfill its obligation towards the whole of society (at the same time, no need for revolution: it is enough that capital accept the rational formula of exchange).

Capital in fact has never been linked by a contract to the society it dominates. It is a sorcery of the social relation, it is a challenge to society and should be responded to as such. It is not a scandal to be denounced according to moral and economic rationality, but - challenge to take up according to symbolic law.

Hyperreal and imaginary

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 01:22:53 GMT

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.

The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that "ideological" blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It ~s meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.

Moreover, Disneyland is not the only one. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system.

The divine irreference of images

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 01:21:51 GMT

To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign: "Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and pretend he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littre). Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only masked; whereas simulation threatens the difference between "true" and "false", between "real" and "imaginary". Since the simulator produces "true" symptoms, is he or she ill or not? The simulator cannot be treated objectively either as ill, or as not ill. Psychology and medicine stop at this point, before a thereafter undiscoverable truth of the illness. For if any symptom can be "produced," and can no longer be accepted as a fact of nature, then every illness may be considered as simulatable and simulated, and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat "true" illnesses by their objective causes. Psychosomatics evolves in a dubious way on the edge of the illness principle. As for psychoanalysis, it transfers the symptom from the organic to the unconscious order: once again, the latter is held to be real, more real than the former; but why should simulation stop at the portals of the unconscious? Why couldn't the "work" of the unconscious be "produced" in the same way as any other symptom in classical medicine? Dreams already are.

The alienist, of course, claims that "for each form of the mental alienation there is a particular order in the succession of symptoms, of which the simulator is unaware and in the absence of which the alienist is unlikely to be deceived." This (which dates from 1865) in order to save at all cost the truth principle, and to escape the specter raised by simulation: namely that truth, reference and objective caues have ceased to exist. What can medicine do with something which floats on either side of illness, on either side of health, or with the reduplication of illness in a discourse that is no longer true or false? What can psychoanalysis do with the reduplication of the discourse of the unconscious in a discourse of simulation that can never be unmasked, since it isn't false either?2

What can the army do with simulators? Traditionally, following a direct principle of identification, it unmasks and punishes them. Today, it can reform an excellent simulator as though he were equivalent to a "real" homosexual, heart-case or lunatic. Even military psychology retreats from the Cartesian clarifies and hesitates to draw the distinction between true and false, between the "produced" symptom and the authentic symptom. "If he acts crazy so well, then he must be mad." Nor is it mistaken: in the sense that all lunatics are simulators, and this lack of distinction is the worst form of subversion. Against it, classical reason armed itself with all its categories. But it is this today which again outflanks them, submerging the truth principle.

Outside of medicine and the army, favored terrains of simulation, the affair goes back to religion and the simulacrum of divinity: "l forbade any simulacrum in the temples because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented." Indeed it can. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination - the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today.3 Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses of people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination. But this death of the divine referential has to be exorcised at all cost.

It can be seen that the iconoclasts, who are often accused of despising and denying images, were in fact the ones who accorded them their actual worth, unlike the iconolaters, who saw in them only reflections and were content to venerate God at one remove. But the converse can also be said, namely that the iconolaters possesed the most modern and adventurous minds, since, underneath the idea of the apparition of God in the mirror of images, they already enacted his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which they perhaps knew no longer represented anything, and that they were purely a game, but that this was precisely the greatest game - knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).

This was the approach of the Jesuits, who based their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences - the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power - the end of transcendence, which no longer serves as alibi for a strategy completely free of influences and signs. Behind the baroque of images hides the grey eminence of politics.

Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the real. All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meamng and that something could guarantee this exchangeGod, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an umnterrupted circuit without reference or circumference

So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental ax~om). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.

These would be the successive phases of the image:

1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning pomt. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notmn of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its art)ficial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.