the modern apology, the apology for complexity, of the complexity, of the world is really nothing but a but a generalized desire for atony

Abstract: -How would we ask the question of "Basic services" in a term like "Syria:" compare to Zizek's reading of Adorno, and his subsequent critique of "nature" as a "signifier." This historicization of the individual's submission to society bears further resemblances to the Lacanian notion of the symbolic, which (as articulated by Zizek in his self-interview) is critiqued by Derrida for the metaphysical gesture of expanding the symbolic to cover everything, or in the words of the cliché, that a letter always reaches its destination. The people’s need for basic services refers to a fundamental metaphysical antagonism, how the world is imagined in relation to the subject of time. At the level of saying, of worlding, the horizon of sense and non-sense, the needs of the Syrian people demand a degree of basic services, and these civil matters are subject to the temporality of a global time, a schematic subsumed under several names: capitalism, modernity, globalisization, phallogocentrism, the destiny of the West, The Base and Superstructure problem for the Marxists. Displeasure will nominate the negative of the world, rendering Evil as Event of Totally Administrated World. 


Quote: "Art treats a point of thought. The space-time it moves in, surfaces, supports, speed of execution, references, all this is the envelope in which the point of thought is both exhibited and subtracted. It is the locus of the point. The construction of the locus is toil, but this is so on order for the point to fulgurate. This critical point is the visitation of the idea in its contemporary artistic form. Art is pure idea. It is not, as in vitalism, cprporal energy establishing the embrace of percepts and affects. It is not the continuous and projective passage from the experienced jouissance of becoming to living thought. It is on the contrary the establishment of a locus, of course, material, spatial- temporal, but at which the separation of the idea is experienced, and the fact that it can only touch the surface, like a bird skims the sea." 
                                                            --Alain Badiou, Some Remarks on Duchamp

                                                             I

From time to time, I find myself reading about music online. Whatever sweet fetish we may be said to possess regarding carburetor dung and 'zines would seem to be a tepid precursor to the generation of online discourse re: music production. True to form, the administration of production codes has been internalized by the 'populist' rhetoric of a spontaneous journalism known as media blogging, which by its playlists and highly adaptable dissemination platforms target consumers in highly-refined zones of saturation. 

This ideology of 'new music,' which operates under a strategy of sharing residual to the 

technologies that first facilitated the marketization of network, is strongly tied to consumptive models of superego enjoyment. Briefly stated, the notion of superego enjoyment, as formulated by S. Zizek, relies upon an effacement of the ego's role as mediator between the "raw" demands of the Id, and the metaphysical injunctions of the Superego. Without the ego, as such, the short-circuit between the Id and the Superego results in the injunction to 'Enjoy!', an injunction whose repeated failure aligns itself with the standards of post-liberal consumer capitalism, or so the argument would go.

In Zizek's succinct formula, the more one consumes, the guiltier one feels; the guiltier one feels, the more one consumes. A number of half-baked treatises such as the one you are reading now have attempted to articulate this logic, and Zizek himself has streamlined the model via different examples. However, in regards to online music, I think the old slogan for Lay's potato chips works quite well: no one can eat just one. Like re-wired rats, we chase that salty flavor--its anticipation, its blossoming, and the dehisced swallowing of the woody remains--to the end of the bag. One of the most effective strategies that food production has pursued has been the idea of customized packaging. Across the board, whether it be the plus-size 'family' values of wholesale, membership stores, or the strategic delivery of snacks in bodega/markets, the delivery systems are intended to fulfill localized niches under the auspices of the Superego injunction outlined above. Enjoy! Under what condition is your gratification stimulated: organic, low carbs, ethnic flavor, detox, etc.  

Returning to notion of music-online, it must be stated that there has been a similar explosion of delivery strategies. Digital production has made both recording and distribution cost-effective and scalable, which has not rendered the so-called 'major-labels' obsolete, but rather specialists in the high-value production of spectacles. Lady Gaga, for example, is meant to be larger-than-life, a star in the classic sense, which is a strategy that requires expensive production values. I recently watched a video of Animal Collective at this year's Cochella Festival. The stage and lighting design must have cost a fortune, and was necessarily the work of experienced professionals. This was no rootsy-craftsy Paw Tracks production of quilts and paper-mache; this was an expensive spectacle intended to please a massive audience who paid handsomely for the privilege of being-there, however 'high' they may have been. This kind of investment in material production is also apparent in many of the contemporary visual Artists who came of age during the rising hegemony of rock-and-roll. On the one hand, a sense of scale and materiality defined the work of many artists who worked with earth (Smithson) and architectural-grade sculptures (Matta-Clarke, Serra), as well as those who reveled in the bizarre and the precious (Hirst, Koons). Such speculations are defenseless against the Opus Dei-like masonry of proper art criticism, but the suggestions are intended to carry out the logic of major (labels) artists taking refuge in the conceptual space of high-production values, i.e it costs a great deal of money and production to make a Serra sculpture, or a Kanye West video. In an opposite, but identical sense, smaller labels (and, what the hell, major-minor conceptual artists like Kaprow, Lewitt, Balderssari, Turrell) continue the practice of vanity releases, but under the increasingly reified strategy of limited-edition batches of vinyl, tape, or other formats (happenings) of twee-collector commodity fetish. 

Moreover, the generalized notion of the Album and the reactionary question of its demise is largely of question of capitalization. The market potential unleashed by the these technologies and production codes, and maintained by the discursive media dynamics of suggestive 'enjoyment,' is simply immense.  As in the case of Facebook, some of the best mathematical minds in the world are racing to devise modeling capacities that are capable of defining these tremendous, user-defined data sets in actionable terms.  Think of it this way, more music is being produced, consumed, and recommended (recommendation being the basic and dominant service of criticism) today than ever before. Where once a teenager would own two dozen records, fifty tapes, or one-hundred cds, it is not uncommon I think to own 2000 songs or more. Again, the packaging (ipod, phone) fulfills the capacity for enjoyment. In abstract sense, the album has been redefined in this era of 'new music' as something temporal, a fashion of styles that en-genre themselves over a amorphous period of time. And while it is arguable that pop-music as typically operated under the terms of fad, appropriation, and cultural timing, it nonetheless remains to be seen how the algorithms of suggestion will aggregate the sensuous viability of music consumption. In this way, or upon my suggestion, the diminished returns of the Guitar-Hero 'game' would seem misleading; newer interfaces of the 'populist' type, the reification of the ego in a virtual sensibility, or the ego-ization of the market-itself, may prove revolutionary, which is to say--actionable.

                                                                       

II

Do you know what Cal Arts is? Could you engage someone in a discussion of what you could say about Cal Arts on some occasion? Why would one buy a station wagon, particularly from a former Axis manufacturing base?

In all this I mean to ask you something about the critique of some practice, and whether you might find this service of consultancy relevant? Obviously, you can’t keep this up for long without institutional capital. Yet, there are those who, let’s face it, are resourceful outside of established circuits. That is to say, those who are locally resourceful, those who operate to a degree along the margins, and within the particular ecosystem of a genre: bar band, street artist, adjunct professor, non-profit art educator, D.J.

I once was taken to a film at LACMA by my Introduction to Cultural Studies, part II professor. The film was entitled Who Gets to Call it Art?, which is a documentary about professional artists and critics in the decades following the second world war. Indeed, who answers to the name artist? In a theoretical, abstract sense, this question possesses an infinite tropical-lity, a regression in the insufficiency of naming. However, as the Village café playwright John Guare once quipped, “I’m not so interested in how people survive as in how they avoid humiliation. I think avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy and probably our lives.”  Who gives the name of artist without humility, or paradoxically—with perfect humiliation?

I love these songs about the hustle of fathers. The poetry of hip-hop, its modality, lies in its deep paternal anxiety, in this overwhelming honesty that passes for violence and the ruthless access of enjoyment. Some dumb primal father, wild at heart, who speaks only in rhythm and trance like a mad sultan, and who masks with clownish gesture that pure metaphysics of impotence: to represent the companies as moral pariahs and impose regulation on them, rather than try to negotiate. There was a culture within that would resist change: ‘we make great tasting treats that people love—what’s wrong with that?’  

In alienated society, the domain of culture is founded upon the violent exclusion (‘repression’) of man’s libidinal kernel which then assumes the form of a quasi-nature. The sub-individual and pre-individual factors that define the individual belong to the realm of the archaic and biological; but it is not a question of pure nature. Rather, it is second nature, which if unfamiliar to most social thought, that is vital to critical theory. To the individual, second nature is accumulated and sedimented history. It is history so long unliberated—history so monotonously oppressive—that it congeals. Second nature is not simply nature or history, but frozen history that surfaces as nature. It is the petrified evidence of the price pad for ‘cultural progress,’ the barbarity inherent to ‘culture’ itself. The goal of psychoanalysis and its contradictory character thereby reproduce the fundamental social antagonism, the tension between the individual’s urges and the demands of society.

Adorno’s dialectical reading of Freud is no way wishes to abolish this contradiction by conceptual clarification, by market expansion, or by re-branding. He aims at conceiving this Freudian contradiction as an immediate index of the contradiction –that is, antagonism—that pertains to social reality itself. A social reality in which every development of ‘superior’ (spiritual, growth durable/sustainable value) capacities is paid for by the repression of drives in the service of social domination; in which the underside of every ‘sublimation’ (redirection of libidinal energy towards higher, non-sexual goals) is indelibly barbaric. It is precisely this unbearable ‘contradiction’ that the various revisionisms try to avoid, to soften its sting in the name of a ‘culturalism’ that advocates the possibility of a non-repressive ‘sublimation,’ of a development of human creative potentials not paid for by the mute suffering articulated in the formations of the unconscious.  

The non-simultaneity of the unconscious and of the conscious merely reveals the stigmata of a contradictory social evolution. The unconscious accumulates what lags behind in the subject, what is not taken into account by progress and the Enlightenment. It is tempting to add our current notion of gentrification into the mix, which is a kind of metaphysical grasping, an index of the local, of society as such. 

Because Freud comprehended ‘repressive sublimation’ (traumatic repression as the underside of sublimation) as an anthropological constant, he could not foresee the unexpected, paradoxical condition that characterizes our ‘post-liberal society,’ a condition of repressive de-sublimation in which “the triumphant archaic urges, the victory of the Id over the Ego, live in harmony with the triumph of the society over the individual.” The Ego’s relative autonomy was based on its role as the mediator between the Id (the non-sublimated life-substance of the drives) and the Superego (the agency of social repression, the representative of the demands of society). Repressive de-sublimation succeeds in getting rid of this autonomous, mediating agency of synthesis that is the Ego. Through such de-sublimation the Ego loses its relative autonomy and regresses towards the unconscious. However, this ‘regressive,’ compulsive, blind, automatic behavior, which bears all the signs of the Id, far from liberating us from the pressures of the existing social order, adheres perfectly to the demands of the Superego, and is therefore already enlisted in the service of the social order.

The pre-bourgeois universe in which the individual is plunged into the social substance does not yet know this conflict; the contemporary, wholly socialized ‘administered world’ does not know it anymore. “The contemporary types are those in whom any Ego is absent; consequently they do not act unconsciously in the proper meaning of this term, but simply mirror objective features. Together, they participate in this senseless ritual, following the compulsive rhythm of repetition, and grow poor affectively: the demolition of the Ego strengthens narcissism and its collective formations.” The last great act of psycho-analysis is therefore ‘to arrive at the uncovering of the destructive forces which, in the midst of the destructive Universal, are at work in the particular itself.’ According to Adorno, psychoanalysis must discern those subjective mechanisms (collective narcissism, etc.) that, in accordance with social coercion, work to demolish the ‘monodological, relatively autonomous, individual’ as the proper object of psychoanalysis. In other words, the last act of psychoanalytic theory is to articulate the conditions for its own obsolescence.

Adorno is compelled again and again to reduce totalitarian de-psychologization to an attitude of conscious, or at least pre-conscious, selfish calculation (manipulation, conformation adaptation), which is allegedly concealed beneath the façade of irrational seizure. Adorno refuses to treat fascism as an ideology in the proper sense of term, as a rational legitimization of the existing order. ‘Fascist ideology’ is not taken seriously even by its promoters; its status is purely instrumental, and ultimately relies on external coercion. Yet, the reduction of fascist ideology to conscious manipulation and conformist adaptation is clearly insufficient. Lacan opens the possibility of another approach when he clarifies the ideationally neutral nature of psychotic phenomena, which is in discord with the subject’s mental state, as such that no mechanism of the affects adequately explains it. A structural effect, “the nucleus of psychosis has to be linked to a relationship between the subject and the signifier in its most formal dimension, in its dimension as a pure signifier, and everything constructed around this consists only of affective reaction to the primary phenomenon, the relationship to the signifier.”

In this perspective, de-psychologization means that the subject is confronted with an ‘inert’ signifying chain, one that does not seize him performatively (fascism), affecting his subjective position of enuciation: towards this chain the subject maintains a relation of exteriority. It is this very exteriority which, according to Lacan, defines the status of the superego: the superego is law in so far as it is not integrated into the subject’s symbolic universe, insofar as it functions as an incomprehensible, nonsensical, traumatic injunction, incommensurable with the psychological wealth of the subject’s affective attitudes, and bearing witness to a kind of malevolent neutrality directed towards the subject, indifferent to his empathies and fears. At this precise point, as the subject confronts the ‘agency of the letter’ in its original and radical exteriority, the signifier’s nonsense at its purest; it is here that he encounters the superego command “Enjoy!” which addresses the most intimate kernel of his being.

                                               

            III                                            

                                               

By this demonstration, this presentation, I am attempting to think the very concept of the subject: that which is in the object more than the object. Certain thinkers, of which I have read, offer nuanced, nearly quantum explications of this idea of the subject. As with physics, the connections between thought focused upon a quantum level—that movement towards the singular—and the universal thinking of machines that run on the mastery of such possibilities (society as such) is difficult to establish. As a means of utility between the subject and the object, metaphysics has traditionally been the construction of naming the process as such. To think of this, as law, is perhaps too forceful, thus we could say that law is transcendentally structuring. What must happen is always already subsumed into what can happen. This is roughly the idea of freedom, or where the two of Being falls into the one, that flippant shift of perspective (space) between object (time) and subject (time).

Thus, to exist in the world it is necessary to attempt some connection between the world and its remainder, object and subject, particular and universal. The order of the latter parallel in this series is not incorrect, but it is not wrong: remainder, subject, universal. It is the distortion of this surplus that renders meaning, and traces the consolidation of the imagination’s grasping of material reality. Ontology has traditionally been understood as a particular branch of metaphysics, and sometimes as another name for metaphysics as such. Reason, characterized by what Kant called the ‘condition of unconditioned unity,’ assumes a representational relationship between perceiving humans and an independently determined external world. This relationship had produced a ‘two-fold, self-conflicting interest’ for older versions of metaphysicsm, which (according to Kant) trapped reason in insurmountable antinomies. That is, reason’s “peculiar fate” is a movement from universal to particular in determinative judgment and from particular to universal in reflexive judgment. After Kant, the thinking of being can no longer simply characterize ‘what exists’ as if one could determine what things would be like regardless of whether there are humans around to experience them. Subjective processes are recognized as unavoidably implicated in the constitution of the external objective world, thus converting it from a supposedly independently determined thing-in-itself to ‘phenomenal reality.’ When something within the world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this involvement is one which gets laid our by interpretation.

There is always already the spacing of time, and the survival of the gap that circuits a succession of now. As in Zizek’s claim of repressive de-sublimation, the short-circuiting of the Id and the superego, which in Freud’s historical discovery is said to be mediated by the Ego (what is id must become ego), I would argue that superego is the root of metaphysics. The problem of this claim is the necessity of a historicized objectivity, or finding the resonant tone of the superego injunction. Zizek claims that ‘post-liberal’ society is voiced by the superego injunction to “Enjoy!” Traditionally, it would seem that the writing of history, as such, is the mediation of the ego, or symbolic; some popular melody, or pedagogically important music.

By the reference to tonality, I mean to foreground the event, or perhaps what Hussurl called “the appearing of the tone.” As he writes, “on both sides—that is, both in the immanant and in the transcendental spheres of reality—time is the irreducible form of individual realities in their described modes.” Regardless of what is intended—external objects, other people, or internal phenomena—they can only appear as such in a temporal process.[1] The act and intention of hearing a melody contains anticipation, memory, and forgetting. The consciousness of a time itself [requires] time; the consciousness of a duration, duration; and the consciousness of a succession, succession:

If I live in the appearing of the tone, the tone stands before me, and it has its duration, or its alteration. If I focus my attention on the appearing of the tone, then this appearing stands before me and has its temporal extension, its duration or alteration. The appearing of the tone can therefore signify various things here. It can also signify the focusing of my attention on the continuity of adumbration—now, just now, and so on. Now the stream…in its turn is supposed to be objective and to have its time. Here again a consciousness constituting this objectivity and a consciousness constituting this time would be necessary. On principle we could reflect again, and so in infinitum. Can the infinite regress here be shown to be innocuous?

                                                        IV

1.    The tone endures, becomes constituted in a continuity of phases.

2.             While or as long as the tone endures, there belongs to each point of the duration a series of adumbrations running from the now in question on into the blurry past. We therefore have a continuous consciousness, each point of which is a steady continuum. But this continuum in its turn is a temporal series on which we can direct our attention. The drama therefore starts all over again. If we fix any point of this sequence, it seems that there must belong to it a consciousness of the past that refers to the series of past sequences, and so on.

Metaphysics thinks Being as a whole, in a manner of representational thinking. Such thinking has always constructed its princes, its heirs, its access. The ones, the neighbor, whose enjoyment—spacing—is unbearable, the proximity of which seeks its estimation within an economy, a desiring, a tantalization, an appeal to the universal because singularity has Voiced itself. I do not think this is Sublime in the sense of the uncanny shining forth of the beyond in the object, but the grimace of the Real—the exogonic rubbing of the coin. For example, as I was driving here today, before I wrote these words, I saw a boy who was dangling his brown arm out the tinted window of his sporty cheap car. It began to veer slightly into my lane, as if it were a golf ball unveiling the kimono of the green’s topography. In an instance, the object-driver became almost unbearable in the potential of its proximity, and seconds later exited blithely to the right as the road split. This deviation arose through nothing, and the visceral release of event resulted in the fascist bundling of apprehensions. The proximity produces; spacing is the surplus of meaning. This reaction of ignorance, the blithe eclipse of the Other upon me, this is the Neighbor and its sublime enjoyment. This event took place in Echo park, CA. And, if someone were to ask me for an example of metaphysical thinking, I would ask them to describe a Wal-Mart in Hampton, SC. Echo Park and Wal-Mart exist because of a local utility of space submitted to time.

Derrida attempts to foreground the frame of time and space—finitude—which engenders both necessity and contingency in its survival (Being). Deconstruction is. Differánce is Process. What is ultimately at stake, what is at bottom decisive is the concept of time. Let us consider a sequence of nows. The proceeding now, it is said, must be destroyed by the following now. But, Aristotle then points out, it cannot be destroyed ‘in itself,’ that is, at the moment when it is (now, in act). No more can it be destroyed in an other now: for then it would not be destroyed as now, itself; and, as a now which has been, it is…inaccessible to the action of the following now.

An interval must separate the present from what it is in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must, by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present. The present is that from which we believe we are able to think time; yet, Derrida wishes to pursue the inverse necessity: to think the present from time as Differánce.  

In constituting itself, in dividing itself dynamically, this interval is what might be called spacing, the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space (temporization). And it is this constitution of the present, as an ‘originary’ and irreducibly non-simple (and therefore, stricto sensu non-originary) synthesis of marks…that I propose to call arche-writing, arche-trace, or Differance.   

If it appears that one may demonstrate that time is no-thing (non-being), it is because one already has determined the origin and essence of no-thing as time, as nonpresent under the heading of the ‘not-yet’ or the ‘already no longer.’ Being is noontime, time is nonbeing insofar as being already, secretly has been determined as present, and beingness (ousia) as presence. As soon as being and present are synonymous, to say nothingness and to say time are the same thing.

There is the massively evident fact that, until Kant, metaphysics held time to be the nothingness or the accident foreign to essence or to truth. (WD, 47) The principle of non-contradiction is the cornerstone of all metaphysics of presence. The metaphysical subordination of time is still to be seen in Kant. Not only in Kant’s linking of the possibility of time to the intuitus derivativus and to the concept of a derived finitude or passivity, but above all in that which is most revolutionary and least metaphysical in his thought of time. 

On the one hand, Kant maintains that time is a condition for appearances in general, a pure form of sensibility without which there could be no experience in the first place. Time is empirically real, since no object can ever be given to us in experience that would not belong under the condition of time. On the other hand, Kant emphasizes that time only applies to the subjective conditions of sensible intuition. Time is transcendentally ideal; it does not apply to things in themselves but is only a condition of possibility for the appearance of things in finite experience. Time is therefore merely a subjective condition of our (human) intuition (which is always sensible, i.e., insofar as we are affected by objects) and in itself, outside the subject, is nothing. Nonetheless it is necessarily objective in regard to all appearances, thus also in regard to all things that can come before us in experience.

Now it is obvious that if I draw a line in thought, or think of the time from one noon to the next, or even want to represent a certain number to myself, I must necessarily first grasp one of these manifold representations after another in my thoughts. But if I were always to lose the preceding representations (the first part of the line, the preceding parts of time, or the successively represented units) from my thoughts and not reproduce them when I proceed to the following ones, then no whole representation and none of the previously mentioned thoughts, not even the purest and most fundamental representation of space and time, could ever arise.

Thus, the manifold of intuition is not only a multiplicity, but a temporal succession. Yet, the succession of time could never be experienced if the discrete moments were not related to each other and synthesized. Kant’s solution is to contrast the ever-changing empirical consciousness with the unity of transcendental apperception, or the pure, original, unchanging consciousness. (A, 107) 

                                                            V

Traces thus produce the space of their inscription only by acceding to the period of their erasure. From the beginning, in the present of their first impression, they are constituted by the double force of repetition and erasure, legibility and illegibility. A two handed machine, a multiplicity of agencies or origins—is this not the original relation to the other and the original temporality of writing, its primary complication: an originary spacing, deferring, and erasure of the simple origin, and polemics on the very threshold of what we persist in calling perception? But this is because ‘perception,’ the first relation to life to its other, the origin of life, had always already prepared re-presentation.

Alterity is in-dissociable from the spacing of time. Such spacing is irreducibly violent because it breaches any interiority and exposes everyone—myself as well as any other—to the perils of finitude. Thus, when Derrida maintains the irreducibility of the other for the constitution of the self, he does not locate the ethical openness toward other human beings at the core of subjectivity. Rather, what is at stake is the primordial opening to corruption and dissimulation, which opens the possibility of every relation, including the relation to oneself. In his reading of Hussurl, Derrida refutes the possibility of a unmediated presentation and insists on a primordial re-presentation in order to think the violent opening that threatens consciousness from within.

Violence stems from an essential impropriety that does not allow anything to be sheltered from death and forgetting. Each now is succeeded by another now in its very event and thus requires the inscription of memory in order to be at all. The movement of temporalization can be described as the irreducible opening of one now to another now and specifies that the originary being-outside-itself of time is its spacing. The written is always already an inscription of memory, a trace of the past that spatializes time. On the other hand, the written can only be read after its inscription and is thus marked by a relation to the future that temporalizes space. The reason for writing in the first place is to preserve what happens as a memory for the future, which constitutes both the possibility of repetition and its inevitable counterpart: the threat of extinction, of forgetting.

The living present is always already a trace. This trace is unthinkable on the basis of a simple present whose life would be interior to itself. The self of the living present is originally a trace. The trace is not an attribute, and we cannot say that the self of the living present ‘originally is’ a trace. One must think the being-originary on the basis of the trace and not the inverse. This arche-writing is at work at the origin of sense. Because sense, as Hussurl recognized, by nature is temporal, it is never simply present; it is always already engaged in the movement of the trace, which is to say in the order of ‘signification.’ Since the trace is the relation between the intimacy of the living present and its outside, the opening to exteriority in general, to the non-proper, etc., the temporalization of sense is, from the very beginning, spacing.

As soon as we admit spacing at once as ‘interval’ or difference and as opening to the outside, there is no longer any absolute interiority, the outside has insinuated itself in the movement by which the non-spatial inside, which is called time, appears to itself, constitutes itself, ‘presents’ itself.

The outside does not begin where what we now call the psychic and the physical meet, but at the point where the mneme, instead of being present to itself in its life as a movement of truth, is supplanted by the archive, evicted by a sign of re-memorization or a com-memoration. The space of writing, space as writing, is opened up in the violent movement of this surrogation, in the difference between mnene and hypomnesis. The outside is already within the work of memory. The evil slips in within the relation of memory to itself, in the general organization of the mnesic activity. Memory is finite by nature. Plato recognizes this in attributing life to it. As in the case of all living organisms, he assigns it, as we have seen, certain limits. A limitless memory would in any event not be memory but infinite self-presence. Memory always therefore needs signs in order to recall the non-present, with which it is necessarily in relation.

To inscribe something is an act of memory. Words become traces of the past the moment when they are imprinted, a supplement that can retain details even if a one forgets them. Yet, this is a precarious temporality, for writing always assumes a reader to come, which may be beyond my life. Moreover, inscriptions are always under the threat of erasure. An immortal being could never experience the fear of forgetting, yet my own mortal need to inscribe, to write stems from the temporal finitude of everything that happens. The act of inscription already indicates that I may forget, and testifies to my dependence on that which is ‘exterior’ to me.

                                                            VI

In regards to the basic Kantian theme of finitude, our knowledge is the impossibility of attaining the noumenal Thing-in-itself. Kant’s central notion of transcendental schematicism is directed against the metaphysical pretense of deducing being from notion: all our universal notions can yield knowledge only when they are applied to our sensible experience, to the objects given to us through our senses—thus these notions have to be schematized, provided with a procedure for applying them to our experience. Our knowledge is not a direct insight by our mind into the eternal Truth, but the outcome of our mind grappling with the data provided by our senses: our knowledge is literally a Be-greifen (seizing) as synthetic production, the outcome of our mind’s active manipulation of the sensual data we passively receive. For this reason, our knowledge is limited to the phenomenal reality accessible to us as finite beings.

All this leads me to my final observation, which in the perversity of writing and thought, was my initial motivation. This past friday afternoon, as I sat in the bright orange glow of our western apartment, I picked up Joshua Clover's 1989. The tone of book, published by the University of California, is predictably that of academic rock journalism, which is to say part-fan, part-scholar. Clover is, I would gather, a protege of the insufferably mediocre Greil Marcus, which means that the analysis is largely in the mytho-romantic mode. However, in a general sense, a disaffection for jazz has lead younger scholars to a hesitant appropriation of Adorno's musical criticism. Here is the standard line, a clause inserted into the presentation of black jean clad boys at poorly attended panels: "Adorno's contempt for popular music (jazz, most famously) has problematic social implications, particularly among the axes of both class and race. But if these limitations leave Adorno's critique inadequate to the pleasures of popular music, his account of the market conditions that survive in this music as a kind of form is hard to dispute." This fairly representative statement 'adequately' captures the non-polemical assignment to which the book aspires. Look, it seems to say, I'm a fan who values the pleasures of popular music just like you, but if we really want a smart take on this stuff, we got to think outside the box. In truth, and Clover admits as much, this is an appropriation of Adorno mid-wived by Jameson's theoretical programmatic. Indeed, it is the dual paternity of Marcus and Jameson that makes 1989 such an uneasy endorsement. The same can be said of Clint Burn's book The Jamesonian Unconcious, which is competent exercise in program writing (it has to be a flipped dissertation) by a self-described punk rocker. Call me insecure, but I do not want to listen to some guy, who after spending his teenage years 'publishing' a Circus Lupus fanzine, went on to complete his Ph.d at Duke under Jameson, and moreover makes this DC punk narrative the keystone of his appropriation of Marxism. It hasn't aged well, those happenings.

Anyhow, there is a passage in 1989 where Clover predictably celebrates the Bomb Squad's dissonant production techniques of collage and sampling as indices of black urban material oppression; social contradictions that refuse any appropriation by white suburban teens. Clover writes that these techniques fell under a generalized, multivalent attack on hip-hop by the bourgeois, and were thus subsumed by litigation aimed at monetizing sampling-practices (in favor of corporate 'major-label' acts). 

BS producer Hank Shocklee: "We didn't want to use anything we considered traditional R & B stuff--bass lines and melodies and chord structures and things of that nature." Clover thus concludes, "but in accepting the terms, it refutes them just the same, conceiving black noise as a counter-musicality bearing the same predicates: communicative, formally persuasive, emotionally charged...along with preserving the antagonism that is the social foundation of Public Enemy (and, we would argue, the entire genre's foundation in the late eighties,) this dissonance allows the sound to serve multiple functions. It gives the listener the affective experience of constant pressure, surveillance, and the threat of violence, which are horizons of daily life in communities of the Black underclass. For the purported core audience of hip-hop, the sound is a strange version of the familiar, a way of grasping the existential truth of a shared experience. For an audience increasingly comprising more and less affluent white youth, however, the sound arrives as an aesthetic attack more difficult to naturalize or distance than narrative: a largely alien experience that refuses to offer itself as a pleasure. At the same time, the sound's rebarbative edge is explicitly figured as a weapon, as 'black steel' turned back on the armed structures of domination for which the police are both agents and synecdoche."  Later, Clover's disappointment is palpable at the the rise of live hip-hop bands in the acid-jazz style, and the general sampling of jazz that became popular at the end of the decade: "all of these developments served to signify a more traditionally accomplished musicality, and met with a decidedly mixed success both in deflecting besserwisser bourgeois critique and in producing interesting records." 

All this sounds good, especially as a recommendation for Public Enemy's musical and cultural significance, but this kind of mytho-modernist fetish for dissonance as the ne plus ultra critical strategy is a weak version of Marxist hermeneutics, and the worst kind of teleological narrative: the rotten appropriation of black authenticity by the Man. In conclusion, it might be added that after I read the quoted passages above, I turned and saw in the sunlight of the apartment the Futura font of a Charles Mingus record: Mingus at Carnegie Hall. The first side is C-Jam Blues, which is a Duke Ellington number. It sounds like chaos tied to a ship, the phallic masts of the wooden blues bent at the fury of horns blown all to hell. Adorno died in 1969; this was released in 1974. Dissonance is.

--Zizek, S. The Metastasis of Enjoyment. London:Verso, 1996

--Hagglund, Martin. Radical Atheism, Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2009.
--Clover, Joshua. 1989 Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007
--Hurst, Andrea. Derrida vis-a-vis Lacan. Fordham University Press, 2008.