What
do Australian Historians and Intellectuals Have to Say About Globalisation?
Globalisation
and Techno music
By John Carew
The University of Melbourne
(Also
check this wonderful
contribution that John and DJ friend Gordon made to the S11 (alternative) theme
song)
“The fate of the flesh in the context of transnationalisation may be understood
as the preoccupation of the contemporary cyborg film... Thus the cyborg is not
merely a figure for the transnational age, but for transnational capital, that
is, capitalism.” (Beller. “Desiring the Involuntary”)
- Postmodern culture-workers,
on the verge of becoming the “symbolic engineers” and critical self-consciousness
of global capital, stand at the cross-roads of an altered and more fractal
terrain everywhere we gaze at century’s end: a new world-space of cultural
production and national representation which is simultaneously more globalized
(unified around dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more
localised (fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition,
and resistance) in everyday texture and composition. (Wilson & Dissanayake:
1)
Electronic music, the noise
of the integrated circuit, has thrown up its share of curious (non) rock stars.
Of these cultural-workers Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin is one of the more ironic
icons of this dispersed musical genre. His media savvy parody of himself
in the filmclip to his latest release ‘WindowLicker’ is the compact hyperspeed
film text this essay will be interrogating. I won’t be interrogating the
difference between film and filmclip/music video except to point out that the
often unclosed narratives of filmclips happen after the final scene of a movie,
after the story has reached its happy or unhappy ending. As in the case
of ‘WindowLicker’, the filmclip can be a form of serious play unsupervised by
filmic concerns with narrative.
The techno musician, gendered male by a relationship to technology, but tied to
subversive identity politics by the structures of the genre, is I will argue an
important figure to interogate rehetorically because of way it intersects cyborg
body politics and connects them to corporate identities. Put another way
I would seek to argue that the white male as cyborg has the fate of becoming ‘globally
localised’ as yet another form of corporate ID.
Aphex Twin/Richard D. James and his music can be understood as a transnational
music in that they operate within a global Westernised pop culture called techno.
His music is known here in Australia where he played the pop music festival Big
Day Out, he has appeared on the soundtrack to at least one Hollywood movie (9mm)
and the iconography of his album covers has been quoted in Homage by a number
of Manga movies.
- The media inhibits, or
even worse, removes desire and in so doing colludes with the capitalisation
of subjectivity...
- One space, one time,
one person, just one step ahead of boredom and resignation. (Slater,
Miller & Michigan: 1997)
In answer to McLahan’s smarmy
allatonceness the quote above, found inside the cover to a techno record, talks
about the justintimeness of a ‘techno’ subculture all too aware of the bright
lights of corporate co-option. The fate of the flesh in this filmclip opens
up points of anxiety about both the status of the male body within electronic
culture and the corporatisation of the strategies of mobility that link very different
music forms together as techno.
One of the distinct strategies of techno is the denial of the subject and of identity.
Techno is machine music in the sense that composition occurs in relation to an
interface with a machine rather than a conventional musical instrument
or on paper in the form of notation. The central difference between techno
and other pop music’s I would argue is the notion of sequencing -- the pre-structuring
of noises and musical notes and also the filtering processes that the musical
(or non-musical) noises pass through.
A lot of the best techno (I’m also including disparate interrelated sub-genre
like house, drum and bass, acid, trance, ebm and electro) is released, vinyl only
to club DJ’s and die hard collectors. In it’s infancy, at least, biographical
material on artists was strictly limited and names were often reminiscent computer
codes and parts rather than organic objects or the names of people. This
strategy against identity was and is I would argue a reaction against mainstream
music’s obsession with the musician as star as well as a way of loosening artist
from the twin problems of being over-released and becoming to easily identifiable
with a certain sound. The poetics of this strategy then, would be that each
artist needs to be able to make noises suitable to her or his situation.
In ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’ Attali links the phases of political
development in the West to various shifts in the reception and use value of music.
This provides a useful way of approaching the relationship between the west and
it’s noise. Within this tradition changes in music, he argues, have an uncommon
way of prefiguring changes in social relations and relations to institutions.
The major phases in the use, value and meaning of music (its readings) are sacrifice,
representation, repetition and composition.
- The argument of Noise
is that music, unique among the arts for reasons that are themselves overdetermined,
[has a] annunciatory vocation; and that the music of today stands both as
a promise of a new, liberating mode of production, and as a menace of a dystopian
possibility which is that mode of productions baleful mirror image.
(Jameson, 1985: xi)
Composition is Attali’s utopian
phase, the phase where all the members of a society are given the tools to compose
meaning and music out of the Noise of life.
- But the very death of
exchange and usage in music, the destruction of all simulacra in accumulation,
may be bringing about a renaissance. Complex, vague, recuperated, clumsy
attempts to create new status for music not a new music, but a new
way of making music are today radically upsetting everything music
has been up to this point. (Attali, 1985: 134)
This narrative of the return
of imaginative energy to scenes and individuals, the collapse of the division
of labour also informs music’s from punk to techno and perhaps more importantly
their relationship to the mainstream of music consumption.
The sequencing of music in techno is also the sequencing of life under transnational
capitalism. The pleasures of mobility made available by commodities like
the discman and the portable computer also mean paying the price of an increasingly
deterrotorlised commodification of local taste and scenes. For the musician
the price is the increased demand to delocalise your music in an attempt to sell
it in the transnational market. Our figure Aphex Twin/Richard D. James as
techno musician re-coup's his credibility by mimicking the corporate strategy
described as ‘global localisation’: ‘Transnationalization of corporate identity,
thus, implies a process of global localization: crossing borders and segmenting
markets via flexible production’ (Wilson & Dissanayake, 1996:4).
Tied as he is to this process of ‘global localisation’ as a corporate identity
rather than a human or star means identity in the instance of his film work has
to be recouperated through the machine. If the music of techno is based
on the process of sequencing in the first instance and filtering after that the
reverse is true in the film clip for the song ‘WindowLicker’
Locating the cyborg in this text should logically not be too difficult; Harraway’s
cyborg ‘...is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature
of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.’ (1985: 65) The rock
star and especially post-modern rock-stars, characters such David Bowie who has
played characters such as Ziggy Stardust and Major Tom who refused to
settle on identity as a stable given should make easy cyborgs. Perhaps these
characters are cyborgs in the sense that the technologies of music distribution
and of fame mediate their identities. The title of this piece ‘WindowLicker’,
which could suggest a sexual obsession with surfaces, however locates the cyborg
elsewhere, revealed within the privileged viewer with specialised knowledge of
the music, the scene and Aphex Twin/Richard D. James as an artist.
For Harraway, though, the cyborg is not only a figure of spectacle but also of
political and social ‘reality’ the lived field of social relations (Harraway 1985,
65). Harraway uses this figure to deconstruct contemporary feminism’s attachment
to organic myths of wholeness. The kinds of narratives that Harraway asserts
also maintain Western patriarchal capitalism: “The cyborg skips the step
of original unity of identification with nature in the Western sense. This
is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as
star wars.” (ibid: 67)
The artist/cultural producer as cyborg in fact is parodied from almost the second
scene of the movie. An impossibly long, phallic, limousine pulls up in front
of two impressed black women and reveals a subtly but obviously transformed Aphex
Twin, this incidentally being a product of my own knowledge of what Richard D.
James “really” looks like, is first seen learning in the back seat of the vehicle.
He leaps out and a body presumably not his own performs a parody of Michael Jackson’s
trademark dance moves. Michael Jackson, as contemporary cyborg, is exactly
the kind of figure that this filmclip calls on to parody pop music’s stars.
Michael Jackson being parodied in this way already highlights the mobility of
identity that is being contested in this filmclip. Michael Jackson is a
character who turned from black to white, his skin being artificially lightened
(although this is not provable) in order to ensure his ‘star’ status. His
identity as artist is based on an otherness from both race and sexuality (gossip
about his sexual tastes again gossip that refuse evidence that proves their truth).
In his filmclip ‘Leave me Alone’ he constructs a fantasy world based around images
of his neverland ranch and sings a song that is all resentment about being the
subject of identity. In ‘Makes me want to scream’ he relocates to outerspace
and a fairytale craft where he’s free to play identity games in zero gravity.
Michael Jackson plays his games with identity in zero gravity, but Aphex Twin/Richard
D. James plays out identity at filmic street level. The scene before his
Michael Jackson dance features representations of black sexuality favoured by
a lot of MTV generation filmclip consumers. Black men and women as hyperreal
heterosexuals tied to base sexual economies. The dialogue from this exchange
is: ‘Girl who wants to fuck? Get in the car, lets get some liquor and get
it on!’
The cyborg here cannot be located in any figure represented on the screen.
The fictions on screen do not relate to fictions of lived reality in the way that
Harraway’s feminist science fiction does. They do as will be argued later
inhabit cyborg flesh. What is at stake rather is the construction of the
cyborg gaze. This then is, the way that the spectator of film clips for
techno tracks, manga movies as well as reading strategies employed when interacting
with the Internet, computer games and other hypermedia has their gaze constructed
as cyborg, part fiction but also part of the social fabric of their lives.
Because so much imaginative and erotic energy within contemporary pop music is
geared towards the contemplation of the male body, the question of spectatorship
of the male body has to be interrogated:
- “…in a heterosexual and
patriarchal society the male body cannot be marked explicitly as erotic object
of another male look: that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic
component repressed. The mutilation and sadism so often involved […]
are marks both of the repression involved and of a means by which the male
body may be disqualified, so to speak, as an object of erotic contemplation
and desire.
- (Neale, S., Masculinity
as Spectacle, p.281)
This psychoanalytic construction,
the gaze in relation to the male body bears a dialectical relation to the structure
of the gaze in ‘Windowlicker’. Certainly the erotic component of the male
body is sublimated into something else cyborg women all with Aphex Twin/Richard
D. James’ face but the disqualification’s are not the mutilation of horror but
the ridiculous mutilation of parody.
The filmclip’s compact confusion of the categories of race, gender and sexuality
are impossible to unpack. No single figure within the text owns up to being
the privileged figure for erotic contemplation.
The techniques this filmclip employs, the morphing of faces and bodies through
digital techniques as well as other more traditional ones of the jump cut all
point to a fetishistic obsession with the surface of things. The surfaces
of race animalistic black relations to heterosexuality that remain an imperialist
obsession of western popular culture (words like fuck and bitch), the surfaces
of the female bodies, and also the reflective nature of the filmic medium highlighted
through the addition of excessive sun and light flare to highlight the anti-realist
composition of the clip.
This obsessive play of surfaces is located in the female flesh and yet disrupted
by the morphic filter that places Aphex Twin/Richard D. James’ face on all these
female bodies. The disrupting element of the morphing is Aphex Twin/Richard
D. James’ beard the key signifier that this is a male face, it is the only non-surfaces
within ‘WindowLicker’. This reading of a beard as non-surface should seem
curious within the context of a reading that argues that this filmclip is all
surface, and yet Aphex Twin/Richard D. James’ beard and face remain submerged
within a parody that works against the pleasure of a play of surfaces. Rey
Chow’s article ‘The Force of Surfaces: Defiance in Zhang Yimou’s Films’ resistance
can be located in the exhibitionist rather than voyeuristic aspects of the surfaces,
the to-be-looked-at-ness of the female body:
- Equally important is
that such a spectacle seems familiar, conventional, at times even banal. […]
if a certain force emanates from surfaces, it is not only because surfaces
are glossy but also because they are hackneyed and cliched. (Rey Chow 1995:166)
Given the anti-identity politics
of techno, as outlined above, and Aphex Twin/Richard D. James’ situation as a
star emerging from within a closed scene, the generalised antagonism towards erotic
presentations of maleness within spectatorship and the strategy of hiding within
global localisation to maintain some freedom of production it is logical that
a beard functions is non-representative and anti-surface in this context.
Even after the initial transformation of black females into multi-racial, drag
versions of Aphex Twin/Richard D. James the two black characters fail to be deterred
in their quest for easy sex as if they haven’t noticed the blurring of genders
that has occurred.
This parodic reading of the male gaze, it’s relation to the male and female body,
can be read positively I would argue as a contestation of the privilege of the
male gaze. To read the body with a cyborg gaze is still to maintain that
voyeuristic relation to the object of desire but it is also to admit and take
pleasure in the fakeness of this construction of femininity, to highlight the
relation between media and the gaze, and to get the joke opens up spaces to extend
forms of representation.
The fate of the flesh in this filmclip, the fate of the white male cyborg as producer,
viewer and worker might be in fact to become the simulacra, the fleshy embodiment
of corporate mobility. The fate of the privileged worker already seems to
be modulated by increased surveillance of their work, overwork and self-destructive
over consumption. The techno musician as cultural worker using corporate
identity to further her/his own goals of production is an important figure to
understand because of the way these identities can be passed on to other forms
of resistance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Attali, Jacques Noise:
The Political Economy of Music. (UK: Manchester University Press, 1985).
- Beller, Jonathan L. “Desiring
The Involuntary: Machinic Assemblage and Transnationalism in Deleuze and Robocop
2.” In Robin Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (eds) Global/Local: Cultural
Production and the Transnational Imaginary. (Durham: Duke UP,1996), 193-218.
- Chow, Rey “The Force
of Surfaces: Defiance in Zhang Yimou’s Films,” in Primitive
Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema.
(New York: Columbia UP, 1995), 142-172.
- Haraway, Donna "A
Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth
Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149181.
- Jameson, Fredric “Foreword”
In Attali, Jacques Noise: The Political Economy of Music. (UK: Manchester
University Press, 1985).
- Wilson, Rob and Dissananyake
“Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local.” In Robin Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake
(eds) Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary.
(Durham: Duke UP,1996), 1-18.
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