When Walter Benjamin wrote the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction, he commented that reproduction removed from art it’s ‘aura’ (Benjamin, 1936). Pre-industrial commodities relied on the producer’s hand marking the goods to be sold, but this aura was removed by machinic production. As Roland Barthes and others have noted, the author of the text was dead. (Barthes, 1967).
When we purchase commodities, we no-longer understand their conditions of production – what Bernard Stiegler has described as the ‘unknowable past’ of technologies. (Steigler in Gallope; 2006). For music and the arts in particular- technologies which we use to store our consciousness – this lack of ‘aura’ hinders the ability to have an intimate relationship with these machines. As Gallope exaplains, this storing of consciousness outside the body requires trust: “Every technical device must be trusted to be used, to be, in Heidigger’s term, ready to hand.” (Gallope; 2006) 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; 2006).
“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 relies on their congruity with our own body - and since almost all our interactions are mediated through our hands – trust in their suitability for them. 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). This post will focus on the circulation of conspicuously hand-made commodities which attempt to re-instate the missing aura of the commodity.
Let’s talk about this concept of re-instating the hand-made using the example of a vinyl album released in 2006 by 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). Abbate theorizes that we can “sense within the events of music, the voices of the commentators that enunciate them.” (Abbate; 1991, 15). Knowing that he would soon die, J’Dilla has marked himself on the record with song titles including: ‘Bye’; ‘Dilla says go’ & ‘Don’t Cry’. The album is an attempt to impress temporaility and ‘live-ness’ onto the continuous commodity of the record. This is a tactic that is increasingly common since the adoption of digital reproduction techniques.
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 is in direct opposition to the modes of production critiqued by Adorno & Horkheimer in their essay Enlightenment as Mass deception, in which they noted that in mass entertainment ”every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth.” The anxious inclusion of errors, static, noises and the artist himself aims to counteract the disembodied nature of digital music.
Donuts transcends the death of the artist brought about by recording, and in this case, death of the artist literally. 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.
To explain the circulation of a self stamped on a object we should consider Marcel Mauss, who wrote in his classic work The Gift that “The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver. The objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them.” (1990:31). This contradicts the logic of capitalism which encourages obligation free transfer of capital through monetary systems. Hand-made commodities have the indelible ties with their producers. This intersection between native values of eros and capitalist value of logos is discussed in Hyde’s critique of Mauss, in which he positions the gift as eros in opposition to the market economy as logos. (Hyde, 1983).
When Mauss says “the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given” (1990), he touches on not only gifts, but on secondhand objects themselves. Movies such as The Eye (2008) centre themselves around the continuation of a person when their objects or body parts are transferred to other people. The fear of such object-personification is dealt with in rituals of ‘cleansing cursed objects’. Such superstitious practices are in place because some cultures recognise that “diabolical undeadness is what partial objects are about” (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006).
So what are we refering to when we talk about autonomous partial objects? Zizek, following on from Lacan, sees the partial object as a site of fear, because it acts without meter or constraint (Zizek, 1995).
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 that 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.” Whilst this was considered an abject image, and spawned much criticism, it was ultimately a more comfortable situation than the other possibility: the man becoming the tongue.
Zizek mentions the Hans Christian Anderson tale of The Red Shoes in a short peice on Lacan. In this story, an impoverished girl chooses a new pair of shiny red shoes, which cause her to dance uncontrollably day and night, almost killing her. She is saved when an executioner cuts off her feet, which continue to dance around. “These shoes stand for drive at its purest: an ‘undead’ partial object that functions as a kind of impersonal willing: ‘it wants’, it persists in its repetitive movement (of dancing), it follows its path and exacts its satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject’s well-being.” (Zizek, 1995).The fear of ’becoming the other’ is a metanarrative used in Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde, The Exorcist and numerous zombie/werewolf films. Zizek terms this the ‘ventriloquist effect’ – something acting through you. (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006). But 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 in Fiennes; 2006). For an excellent website on disembodied hands in horror films, see this site.
The Hands of Orlac (released 1924, remade by Christopher lee in 1960, below), stars a pianist whos hands are severed in an accident. When they are replaced with the hands of a murderer, he takes a liking to strangulation rather than sonatas. As the excellent trailer below asks: “Do the hands control the man that owns them?”
The Beast with five fingers explores the return of a dead man’s hands, seeking revenge, and playing pianos.
Similarly Dr. Stranglove, played by Peter Sellers (below) literally is unable to control his right hand. The fight to control this object which does as it pleases it central to the film - to control mindless acts of total identification with something.
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. (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006).
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 (Deleuze & Guattari; 1972). 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?
Michel Gondry’s excellent film The Science of Sleep (2007) also deals with partial objects, centering around Stephane’s inability to control his hands. In the opening sequence of the film, a piano falls down the stairs of his apartment, crushing his hand. When it is being bandaged, a neighbour sprays his hand with foot deoderiser as a placebo – which he perceives as being effective. It is as if his hand lacks identity - it is effortlessly re-territorilized as a foot.
Stephane’s seeming lack of control in his own life is represented in his dreams by cumbersome hands, which cause him to ‘make mistakes’. In his dreams they become “the size of houses,” they become autonomous -violently attacking his dull co-workers. This is ultimately a liberating experience for Stephane – he takes the boss’s office, has sex with the secratary over a xerox machine, and relaxes in a desk chair. “This is what liberation means…the only way to get rid of this autonomous partial object is to become the autonomous partial object.” (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006). Stephane’s hands, the autonomous partial object, ‘take over’.
This desire to become a pure ‘hand-machine’ sees Stephane lust after a character who is dexterous and in control of her hands. Stephanie’s skill is embodied by an apartment full of delicate hand made dolls and dioramas, as well as her ability to play the piano (a hand-centric instrument). In the short clip below, he comments that “it’s as if her synapses are directly married to her fingers.”
Liveness and transcience are key markers of hand-made objects – seemingly because they enunciate their circumstances of production. Machined products are ideally without flaws, without seams – most perfectly represented in the modernist alien spaceship of the 1950s – a circular single, perfect peice of smooth metal. But with the hand-made, we distinctly desire a roughness, an uneven, ’striated’ surface (Deleuze & Guattari; 1987).
The fetish of serendipity & chance is realised through physical movements of the body – most obviously represented by the abstract expressionist art movement, and in particular the works of Jackson Pollock. As for music, artists are encouraged to use machines that allow experimentation - machines that produce varied results. Rather than brokenness or obsolescence, musicians speak of the warmth, authenticity, humanity, and even sexuality of analog sounds, tube amplifies, and vinyl LPs, as compared to the coldness, inauthenticity, and disembodied character of digital recording, integrated circuits, and compact discs.(Goodwin; 1988, 265, Auner; 2000). The disembodiment of digital recordings can be taken literally: when we create, play and use a digital file, we no-longer engage with it physically. As the jack of all trades Brian Eno elaborates:
I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. This transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse. Musicians enjoy drawing on that finesse (and audiences respond to its exercise), so when muscular activity is rendered useless, the creative process is frustrated.
A musician’s own personal style is communicated through movements which are difficult, if not impossible to emulate due to the “unreliable muscles” we enact. This aesthetic allows individuals to trust technics whose “history we did not live” (Steigler; 1998, Gallope; 2006, 7). I think this is Link’s point when he comments about roughness, mistakes and distortion, which he terms ‘noise’.
“Noise can thus function as a ’suture’ in film theory, stitching our subjectivity into the recording. An LP’s hiss, crackle, and warpage emerge as surprisingly essential aspects of listener identity.” (Link, 2001)
This yearning to understand the terms of production which in mass production are obscured and hidden is allowed by hand-made aesthetics, which enuciate the terms of a commodity’s production. This yearning to understand process is touched on in Northern Exposure, Season 3, Episode 12 “Burning down the house”. This episode deals primarily with Chris’s attempt to create a personal, hand-made event by flinging a cow using a trebuchet .
“I’ve been here now for some days, groping my way along, trying to realize my vision here. I started concentrating so hard on my vision that I lost sight. I’ve come to find out that it’s not the vision, it’s not the vision at all. It’s the groping. It’s the groping, it’s the yearning, it’s the moving forward. I think Kierkegaard said it oh so well, ‘The self is only that which it’s in the process of becoming.‘ Art? Same thing. The thing I learned folks, this is absolutely key: It’s not the thing you fling. It’s the fling itself.”
For more on this episode, see my post here.
So what does the actual flinging of a piano represent?
When Chris is dragging a log down main street for part of the trebuchet, there is an obvious allusion to Jesus carrying the cross.
In creating the trebuchet, Chris is creating an event, an element stretched over following ones that forms an infinite series that contains “neither a final term, nor a limit.” (Deleuze; 1992, 2). Later in the fourth season the trebuchet is re-used to fling the coffin of a deceased friend of Chris.
This ’stretching’ of the event over time is also apparent in Christ’s crucifixion. Rather than his death being the limit of compassion, of ’god’s love’, the event is repeated both symbolically in the form of the cross and relgious services, and also by Catholic Flagellents in New Mexico, who actually crucify themselves (not to death, however).
Both Chris’ strive to fling a cow and Christ’s death include what Deleuze names as the third component of the event – the individual – which comes to represent “creativity, the formation of a new.” (Deleuze; 1992, 2). To Chris, a character obesessed with the creation of his own becomings, the event is symbolic of his own “groping around in the dark”. For Jesus, it wasn’t the death that mattered, moreso the act of dying. Crucifixion, which is a slow and public death, suits this purpose perfectly. If Jesus had been guillotined, or shot, or thrown off a cliff, the transitory nature of the dying body would not have lasted long enough to me remembered. To be on the cross is to be in the becoming state between life and death. It thus served to create the death of Jesus as an event. And even the final death and entombment became the opportunity for another becoming – the ressurection.
The trebuchet fling is an event crafted by Chris to create ‘tomorrow’s memories’, to create a social participation that will likely outlast his own physical embodiment. In his strive to create the authentic, he is striving to create something original, something hand-crafted that demonstrates his own personal becomings.
If indeed industrialization of art removed it’s aura, then perhaps the action of handmade aesthetics re-instates this aura, marking it within a time and space. The circulation of such commodities is based on both a fetish and fear of the disembodied object or artist. A hand free of a body is free to pursue its desire – for better or for worse – which is why this motif has been so heavily utilised in screen texts. The hand is an event that is depicted as ‘going on’ after death – demonstrating that even if the author is dead (literally in the case of j’dilla) he or she can still ‘touch’ you.
Bibliography:
Abbate, Carolyn, Unsung Voices: Opera & Musical Narrative in the 19th Century, Princeton University Press, UK, 1991
Adorno, Theodore & Horkheimer, Max; the Culture Industry: Enlightenment as mass deception in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, London & New York, Routledge, 2007
Benjamin, Walter, the Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, 1936
Cage, John Silence: Lectures & Writings Wesleyan Publishing, NY, 1961
Deleuze, Giles, & Guattari, Felix Anti Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia University of Minnesota, 1977.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, The Smooth & the Striated, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, B. Massumi (trans) London & New York, Continuum, 1987.
Deleuze, Gilles; What is an Event? In The Fold: Leibniz & the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, London, The Athlone Press, 1992
Eisenberg, Evan, Music Becomes a Thing, in the Recording Angel: Music, Records & Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, Picador, London, 1987
Eno, Brian. “The Revenge of the Intuitive: Turn Off the Options, and Turn Up the Intimacy.” Wired 7/1 January 1999. .
Gallope, Michael, Heidegger, Stiegler, and the Question of a Musical Technics, New York University, July 2006
Guattari, Félix, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984
Hallan, Elizabeth; Hockey, Jenny; Howath, Glennys; The Body In Death; Contested Bodies eds
Holliday, Ruth, and Hassard, John. London and New York; routledge, 2001.
Link, Stan, The Work of Reproduction in the Mechanical Aging of an Art: Listening to Noise, Computer Music Journal; Spring2001, Vol. 25 Issue 1, p34-47, 14p
Lyssiotis, Peter; Gyorgy, Scrinis; CD’s and other things, Backyard Press, Melbourne, 1994
Steigler, Bernard, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (trans) Collins & Beardsworth, Stanford University Press, 1998
Zizek, Slavoj, Organs Without Bodies, Deleuze & Consequences, Routledge, New York, 2004
Zizek, Slavoj; Love beyond Law, The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society issue 160-61 1996
Filmography:
Fiennes, Sophie & Zizek, Slavoj; The Perverts Guide to Cinema, 150 min, 2006
Gondry, Michel; the Science of Sleep, 105mins, 2007
Harrison, Nate; Can I Get an Amen? [Sound recording on acetate], total run time 17:46, , 2004
Johnsen, Andreas; Christensen, Ralf; Moltke, Henrik; Good Copy, Bad Copy, Rosforth productions, 58mins, Denmark 2007
Kubrick, Stanley, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, 93 mins, 1964
Shallet, lee, Northern Exposure, ‘Our Tribe’ (Season 3, Episode 12) Original Air Date: January 13, 1992
Thompson, Rob, Northern Exposure, ‘Burning down the house’ (Season 3, Episode 14) Original Air Date: February 3, 1992
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