Music is older than the World
“Under the regime of thermodynamics, becoming collapses into being like a piece of light, suddenly shy when observed. The arrow of time defined by thermodynamics must be dissolved. Feedback from the future must guide the development of the present and the past. In time is when we notice change, we notice change when light reaches our eyes. It is time for a change. The creation of a new spacetime, it's time for a change, the production of a new spacetime. The beginning of Man lies in sound vibration. It is through sound that we produce new spacetimes. The word is the weapon, to destroy the old world, and the tool to build the new.” ~ Rasheedah Phillips
The symbols that codify our world swerve indeterminately and this is, more or less, how we opened Issue Zero of our nameless magazine, and I came back to this question again in the series of articles and essays I had written in the second phase of Becoming that followed Issue Zero, primarily in an essay called The Darkside of Ecstasy. At no point in my life have I sat down to write an editor’s letter, or an article, while we are not living through some kind of exceptional, terrible situation, whether that be COVID-19, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. There is always this inescapable background ambience of doom and tragedy, and we on the left tend to feel responsible to avoid escapism, seeing it as an opiate or anaesthetic. If we are to fail to amass a response to injustice, the least we can do is have some decorum—to realise that it is a funeral that we are dissociating away from. It has always been this way, it didn’t start with Ukraine, it didn’t start with COVID, and it didn’t start with the ’08 crash. I could dig up essays and articles I had written five years ago, fresh out of Goldsmiths college, about endless war—the hidden secret component of Capitalism. The deficits and failures of Capitalism are salvaged through industrialised, commoditised and speculative warfare; the meat grinder demands sacrifices. I again come back to this question today, in the midst of another genocide: what are we doing?
It has been, however, more than a year since I touched this topic, and I am quite ready to answer the question in a completely different way, if you are willing to hear me out.
* dramatic pause *
Is this life? Or a simulation of it? Are we living? Or are we imitating living? Are we but SIMs characters, moved not by an operator with intention, but coerced through channels of necessity that are determined by a symbolic codification or codex. What I have chosen to take from Baudrillard’s work, having spent a long time editing a long text on Baudrillard’s work from a serious, devouring scholar, or what aspect of his work I have found transformative concerns what we might call his metaphysics, although given his opposition to the idea of metaphysics as part of the rationalist tradition it may be better to simply speak of Baudrillard’s imaginary. Baudrillard writes of a Universe, a Real, which appears two-fold, but is continuous. There is the reality we know and experience as sensation, and there is the real, which lurks off in the distance, secretive and unknown. Another way of saying this regards the subconscious-gap, or the distance between the supposedly objective real and the subjective real we experience internally—yet as we will explore, it is quite the opposite. Courtesy of our western tradition, Baudrillard’s notion of a real that appears two-fold (real & reality) maps perfectly onto the binary codex of Earth/Sky (Gaia & Uranus), Female/Male, Material/Immaterial, Body/Mind, Sound/Image, Ear/Eye, Negative/Positive, Materialist/Idealist, and as Derrida made explicitly clear, the reason these pairs of symbols all fit together is because they are the fundamental signs out of which all of our codes are written—quite literally, the suggestion is that the hegemony of rationalism has digitised everything, reducing everything to a sum of binary codes.
Our language, our thoughts, our discourse, everything is underwritten in such a way that makes it difficult to refer to the Universe outside of that which can be seen, as the very material that words, as symbols, are made out of, lacks the capacity to interact with or acknowledge or refer to, that which cannot be observed positively. In being unable to refer to that which exists the other side of the threshold of what we can know positively, the real has long since drifted away, out of sight, out of reference. Baudrillard importantly writes that capitalist modernity is characterised by a logic of unilinear accumulation, and in many ways argues that it is the demands of capitalism, which in this case refers to the singular demand to maximise the efficiency with which capital is accumulated unilinearly, that condition our world, through conditioning our symbols and values. It is not particularly cynical anymore to understand that if a rave organiser is only thinking about making-money, then maybe the party is going to suck, maybe they don’t invest in a good sound system, or don’t hire any ‘workers’ who help mitigate sexism or assault, or cut drugs with impurities to maximise profits — if a school is only thinking about capital, it will cut and slash its way down to ruin, then privatise itself to every student and teacher’s peril. What kind of a world would we build if all the musicians were forced to think about money? Or forced to reformat their practices in such a way that allowed them to earn money. If all the world’s music cultures were organised around capital, what reality would we be uttering or chanting into existence?
Baudrillard’s imaginary then, is constituted by a real which appears to us as one thing but has a secret. The reality we know is made of symbols, it is constructed, through a practice that Baudrillard calls Ritual. In Ritual, symbolic associations between the real and representations of the real are forged, and our world is made-sense of and codified in reference to the representations or images. In this sense, we live in amongst the representations, the images. When Rasheeda Philips said “it is through words that we produce new spacetimes”, it can be understood perfectly through Baudrillard’s work—through forging signs, we build our reality, we ‘rise up’ or ‘leap out of’ the murky indeterminacy of the ‘void’. Yet, when the western philosophical tradition subjected its practice to the real itself, it produced a master sign that carries with it a fatal error. According to Derrida, that master sign was Present/Absent, an oppositionally-structured, closed, individuated and dualistic sign. This sign contains within it a clear reference to the two-foldedness of reality, but Baudrillard writes that this two-foldedness is fundamental to us as subjective observers living within a simulation made out of representations, words, signs, values, not fundamental to the real itself. The fatal error is to conduct a metaphysics on top of this that suggests that the split we observe is real, when it is merely an illusion of reality. The secret is that there is no reality that is beyond the real, reality is made out of the real, in reference to it. Laruelle would say that there is no such thing as Black/White, only Black, a truly all-encompassing Black that glitches momentarily in the eye of the observer, as the observer’s internally rendering system fails to account for the infinite recursion of Black. In the language of Achim Szepanski, rhythm arises from the noise, but is saturated with indeterministic distributions of noise at all levels. For Thomas Nail, everything is chaos in motion, but due to the probability alone, within infinite chaotic movement, patterns of motion arise. Sometimes, patterns are of such disciplined consistency or determination that either we notice them directly, or we notice other more identifiable patterns that metastasise on the surface of the ones we can’t notice. When this happens, the layers of patterns become entangled. Yet, these metastable patterns of motion are always, in the most fundamental way, made of chaos. We can no longer speak of the void, in the traditional sense, the void only exists within the classically rationalist frame, as now we know of quantum fluctuations, and now we know that the opposite of our assumption has always been true: the emptiest of space is rather the fullest, or most informationally dense and thus unidentifiable. We arrive at what looks quite a lot like a Spinozist deity, a reflexive, self-generating universe that moves chaotically, and in doing so, produces metastable conditions, at least conditions that appear stable to an observer. Appearing stable is good, enough to build a life around, to settle, have children, start a project, build a house, a community, grow roots. Yet, we also know explicitly that the conditions we are rooted into will change, and apparently much sooner than later. Nonetheless, it is both miraculous and inevitable that such stable rhythms can metastasise, that such unimaginable complexity can develop on top of them. It can seem as if a leaf falls from a tree, and in the time it takes for the leaf to land, an entire universe is born and dies on the leaf’s surface.
It is through ritual that we forge the symbols that are the structures our world is made of, the words that tie everything together and make sense of it all, without which everything would seem disconnected or without meaning. Music, then, has a unique position within Baudrillard’s imaginary, as it is inexplicably linked to the world-building properties of ritual. Music ubiquitously accompanies ritual, facilitating it, positioning itself as if it is just there, whilst being the key to it all. The secret hides in plain sight, you just can’t eye it because it isn’t an image, it’s a sound. Derrida accused the western tradition of bypassing the ear, because the ear is the negative organ, the organ that is tuned to the real, not reality. You see what is there, but you can hear what isn’t, the ear betrays the perfect illusion of light, it always reminds us, whispering to us that what we see isn’t real, it’s a lie. Music was there when our World was born, covered in blood, shameful, crying; music oversaw the whole process. Music delivered us.
In Issue Zero, we flaunted the quotation from Sun Ra where he states: the problems in this world are caused by the music that musicians are playing, that they are forced to play, by people who only want money. Yet, it has taken the two years since then to arrive at a way of explaining really what he is insinuating. The music we play guides the ritualistic building or upholding of our world, and if we are always forced to think in terms of capital, then it makes sense as to why Sun Ra and Baudrillard seem to shake hands over the agreement that we have summoned “late-stage capitalism”, or rather, chanted it into being through our capital-oriented musical world-building. We built this world, and we are still building it, with an on-going ritual: over thousands of years, symbolism has been organised or choreographed, so that each symbol was in the right place, at the right time. Yet, within all this supposed pessimism lies the most hopeful, life-affirming philosophy of all — all we have to do, is sing a different song, with the right intention, and the world will miraculously change in front of our eyes. It does have to be enough of us, however, to change the tune, and the simple truth that together we are strong is one of the main challenges capital faces. Like a mindless AI designed to produce more of itself endlessly, it favours capital greatly if we cannot organise amongst ourselves to resist the dehumanising process of forced, exploitative labour, and every time a new war begins, it becomes as clear as day, that the needs of capital and the needs of nature are completely at odds with each other.
I am ultimately confronted by the same question each day when I wake up, “what are you doing?”, “what is the point?”. I had been depressed for a long time, barely able to answer this question, or refusing to, or driven to stress by an inability to articulate any response, but rediscovering music as this timeless, maternal process that was present at the birth of the world was quite invigorating. So what am I doing? What am I doing right now? I am writing this letter as a part of a ritual that will bring into being ÊT/RE, the project that sees Becoming re-engage with its musical roots at the beginning of all of this. ÊT/RE is as pessimistic as it is life-affirming, taking its name from Nietzsche’s concept of the Eternal Return which sought to replace the binary metaphysics of Good/Evil with a cyclical model — behind the dualistic forms of Good/Evil (etc.) is one continuous real that cycles, swerves, revolves or returns, eternally, bringing with it the best and worst the universe has for us, over and over again. Nietzsche attempts to liberate metaphysics from the binary code, and in doing so finds hope in life again and no longer referred to this secret truth as “the greatest weight”. Brian Schroeder paraphrases Nietzsche in saying “Music, it seems, best approximates the Eternal Return, with its ceaseless flows of differentiation, and it terrorises the rational in its refusal to be reduced to an image”. Music is so real that it terrorises all images and it seduces all signs. Through music, Becoming collapses into Being, and then slowly unravels. To be as becoming again.
Reference List:
Seduction by Jean Baudrillard
Symbolic Exchange & Death by Jean Baudrillard
On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
Tympan Essay by Jacques Derrida
Universe Black in the Human Foundation of Colour by Francois Laruelle
Lucretius Vol I-III by Thomas Nail
The Listening Eye: Nietzsche & Levinas by Brian Schroeder
Ultrablack of Music Vol. I by Achim Szepanski
Beyond Good & Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
Baudrillard’s Challenge by Victoria Grace