Hand Made Donuts

“Are the events of music simply there or do we occasionally sense within them the voices of commentators that enunciate them.” (Abbate; 1991, 15).

Let’s talk about this concept of re-instating the hand-made using the example of a vinyl album released in 2006 by the now dead JDilla (James Dewitt Yancey), titled Donuts. The album is a collection of short edits of soul and funk songs, looped and cut together live on a sampler. It is important to consider that at the time the album was produced, JDilla was in hospital (he passed away three days after the album was released).

The album is heavily stamped with the artist’s own touches – recording the album live, adding errors, scratching, re-cueing the records, adding static, out of time loops, etc. At each song we are reminded that whilst “recordings exist without death, available for nearly infinite playback”, the producer, Dilla, can still be present (Gallope; 2006, 8). This album is an attempt to impress temporaility and ‘live-ness’ onto the continuous commodity of the record.

Gallope sees this drive for ‘live-ness’ as a response to the ‘cold-ness’ of digital recording.

“Performance suddenly appears nostalgic, more real, vulnerable, expressive, ephemeral or drastic. Modern musical performance, whether on the classical stage performing a composed work, touring an album, or reproducing a traditional style, it must be anxiously marked live, authentic, organic, real, as if to preserve the difference of humanity against the constant haunting of immortal, insomniac recordings that seem to proliferate in ever increasing numbers, seeming to come out of nowhere.” (Gallope: 2006, 9)

The liveness of Donuts transcends death of the artist brought about by recording, and in this case, death of the artists corporeality. JDilla demonstrates that the death of body does not equal death of social presence ”…in the absence of the body, social presence still persists, so challenging the current orthodoxy that our embodiment is essential to social membership” (Hallam, Hockey, Howath; 2001, 74). Discogs lists around 13 posthumous releases – he is still releasing albums, creating flows, spawing fansites, producing commodities after death.

‘Ready to Hand’ – Technics and Trust

“Every technical device must be trusted to be used, to be, in Heidigger’s term, ready to hand.” - Gallope, Michael

Bernard Steigler, who used the word technics to refer to philosophies of technology, argued that we trust technics as consciousness prosthetics, as workable instruments whose “history we did not live” (Gallope).

“It is this duality of a technical constitution and a necessary trust or faith in the unknowable past that determines consciousness as extended outside itself, where memory is deposited in technical objects, where consciousness is outside itself” (Gallope; 2006, 7). 

Our trust in the technologies we use comes from their congruity with our own body - our trust in their suitability for our hands. Pre-industrial commodities relied on the producer’s hand marking the goods to be sold – by signiture or by style. But the indsutrial revolution saw the producer’s signiture becoming dislocated from the commodities produced. In order for us to trust and purchase commodities we rely on this hand-mark, and so techniques of re-instating the hand have been employed:

• the re-instatement of ‘hand-made’ aesthetics (made-by-hand).
• the creation of ‘ergonomic’ products (made-for-hand)

Autonomous Partial Objects

The fascinating thing about partial objects, in the sense of organs without bodies, is that they embody what Freud called “death drive”…the dimension of the undead, the living dead, something which remains alive even after it is dead. Something you cannot destroy – the more you cut it, the more it exists. It goes on. – Slavoj Zizek, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

 Zizek employs the Deleuzian ‘Bodies without organs’ concept in reverse, an act which i ultimately see as nothing more than a slight re-orientation, rather than a true shift in meaning. It is possible to see the BwO as the result of a body shifting from a metamachine, an organised whole compiled from smaller parts, to a single machinic entity, which is the subject of singular desire.

Is not the BwO a single organ? A disorientated autonomous partial object/organ seperated from a whole?

The tongue is driven into action by its desire – and must seperate from the body at large in order to persue its desire. The machinic processes the bind the tongue – namely the mouth, teeth, the body, notions of civility and good manners – are transcended by the autonomous tongue which can now fully embrace its own ‘toungue-ness.”

As Zizek speculates;

Perhaps the ultimate bodily part which fits this role of the autonomous partial object is the fist, or rather the hand.  – Zizek, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

The presentation of the autonomous partial object (ApO) is common in popular culture. Disembodies hands represented in popular culture screen commodities – generally to invoke a feeling of fear and unease in horror texts. The final scene of Carrie features the hand of the ‘dead’ reaching up from the grave.

But as well as a feared, the BwO / ApO is a site of fetish.

Protagonists of action films often become an ApO / BwO – demonstrating that the BwO is fetished as a liberated body. There is the moment in action films where a character (after being slowly stripped down to a BwO) knows what they need to do – an single act. This is the point where the charachter runs fowards taking bullet after bullet, but not stopping because he/she no-longer has limbs to feel pain with, no longer sees anything but the goal, the desire.

Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove becomes nothing but a ‘bomb releasing machine’.

This is what liberation means – you first have to get rid of, what within you, attaches you to the leader, the conditions of slavery, etc. – Zizek, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

This kind of ‘death defying’ gesture of the BwO is at the heart of heroism. We can examine the internet fad of ‘epic maneuvers’ as valorizing the grandiose actions of a BwO – these short looping gif animations highlight the moments of ‘dancing inside out’ as Artaud would put it.

 

I’ll be developing these concepts for my final blog post – particularly how artists and creative people use and create themselves as a BwO to sell their products.

I’m also very interested in how the desire for and fear of the autonomous partial object is reconciled.

Get your hands off me! a handcrafted essay question?

Essay questions – choosing one is like choosing your identity.

i’m finding it extremely difficult to seperate my knowledge into weeks, like the questions are listed. I’m also finding it difficult to focus solely on tv texts, because i’ve found the theory useful in any aspect of commodity culture.

I had an idea, an entry point into the theory, and that was an analysis of how ‘the hand’ is a super-commodified object, producing desire in particular, and how this is shown in screen texts. It’s a Digital culture (as in fingers.) The hand without fingers is the equivalent of the body without organs – the fist, the unified action of a flat palm.

It just piled up: all these examples of hands in a single day.

• Starting with ‘eyes wide shut’ - the hands being the only non-cloaked skin shown in the mansions, wedding rings, gloves being warn to hide the hands, leading by the hand, the whole film was like a dance of hands – of homunculus puppets.

                              

• Skins – start of season two, Tony is trying to write after his accident – cannot control his hands.
• J’dilla’s album donuts, and a friend commenting how he has stamped himself all over the record – he has put his little signitures: gestures, re-cueing records, mistakes, scratching.
• scratching itself – hip hop culture – is hands on – getting your hand ON something, stopping the record.

We all desire the authentic other – the non-commodified, ‘real’, which never actually exists but it used as a way of selling the ‘hand made’, as if it somehow bypasses commodity culture.

We all desire contact, real touch - yet we fear the touch of strangers. Zombies are highly corporeal – they pretty much ‘feel around’, sense only by touch, hands held foward. Hand’s outstretched like the feelers of some massive community BwO.

Medical TV always with the ‘doctors life saving hands’ this touching, feeling, tempreture reading, pulse counting, blood stopping (saving private ryan), gloves, getting your hands dirty.

Palm reading (literally reading the hands). Hands as a sign system – waving, shaking, ‘peace’, ‘fuck you’, ‘thumbs up’ that superseeds verbal communication.

Andre Breton wrote:

Tu cuerpo se ajustaba al miouna mano se ajusta a lo que quiere ocultar…

(Your body was consistent with my own, As a hand fits what he wants to hide…)

Our hands are producers of becomings.

There is a commodified ‘hand-made’ aesthetic – used to sell high and low end goods.

Commodity culture serves hands – ergonomic pens, walking canes with shaped handles – these define politics of the hand. The double glove (below) challenges the hand as a single entity.

The hand is a metamachine: nearly all human/machine couplings are mediated by the hand machine.

Only one question left: what the hell kind of essay question does this fit into? If anyone can help, ill promise you a lovely handmade mix cd.

C’mon, give me a hand.

 

 

buying nothing: digital music.

Yosh kindly queried whether the cd’s ‘becoming’ is valid, because it can quickly cross territories, be copied, shared etc.

The digital file can undergo territorial becomings…but i’d argue that without being dropped back to a physical form, the becomings leave no impression.

a becoming: “produces both a rupture and possiblities for new beginnings” (Guattari, Adolescent revolution, 67). Without a physicality, a history, something to be inscribed on, the becoming is simply a new ‘being’. an mp3 is not marked by time, or space, but flows above them.

a copy is not degraded…the cd carries no trace of its past, asides a short name. a pure simulacrum? it does not present it’s history, it hides it.

its the old homage versus pastiche debate: i’d argue that a vinyl re-edit is more a homage – we know it’s a re-edit. whereas when eminem samples labi schiffre, the digital file doesn’t carry this information: it hides it.

All digital files attempt a concealment of their history. There is no such thing as a vintage / retro mp3. They conceal their workings (binary, lasers) as opposed to the physical analogue record / tape / anything that moves. We cannot see the cd: we load it into the machine – a machine we cannot see the workings of.

The vinyl machine is in some ways translucent – we see each part’s contribution to the whole. Label, to pressing plant, to independant shop. The needle in a groove. Whilst machinic, it has seams to be broken into, opportunities for manipulating. A record player can ‘work’ in mulitple ways: it can create more than one single machinic flow – but a cd player can either work, or not.

De/Re-Territorialization of music

It’s an ephemeral thing, the flow of music; what sticks, what fails, what is kept, bought, sold.

Let’s take and follow the territories of a newly purchased vinyl record (vinyl, because it has a physical body to be inscribed with desires). It reads like the bands of a felled tree, letting us know it’s past.

Alright: 12″ single, black sleeve, minimal label info. Myra Barnes Re-edit, ‘Soul Sister’. Originally released late 60’s, re-edit is brand new.

 

Often the re-edit labels have NO info printed, not even a title: which aims to de-territorialize the music from its past, and re-hash it into the current. It doesn’t matter how much has been changed or re-mixed, its the very act of feeding it through the vinyl/dj machine that matters.

When i played it the first time last night at a bar, i was drunk, and knocked the needle straight across the vinyl, leaving a quiet pop every 1.88 seconds recurring across most of the 12″. It’s mine now. No other copy has that noise.

(Speaking of locked grooves, i have a copy of ‘jungle fever’ from the junglebook movie (disneyland), with a groove that loops, over and over. What were the types of Bodies without Organs again? Empty, full and cancerous? Well, a locked groove is cancerous, endlessly repeating the same thing over and over.)

As a record is played, needles, dust, dirt, scratches etc add to the sounds present, perhaps showing how the record is not petrified in its organisation (unlike cd’s). each time a record is played, the recording is brought into the current, into flux.

We have devices to stop these becomings: covers, dust cleaners, low wear styli. But we can reduce wear only to a certain point, whilst still creating music. It acknowledges music as a kind of becoming, and becomings are things that leave marks.