Bernd Herzogenrath

Bernd.Herzogenrath@post.rwth-aachen.de

 

Indeed, you may find that these things are all rather silly. But logic is always a bit silly. If one does not go to the root of the childish, one is inevitably precipitated into stupidity, as can be shown by innumerable examples…

 

–Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 209

 

Techno Music has generally been approached either from the perspective of the artists involved, or in connection with drug (ab)use, or with respect to the politics of rave culture.[1] By framing the issues differently, this paper aims to position Techno in closer relation to literature, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralist philosophy. As a kind of “theoretical background-noise,” I have sampled Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze/Guattari, because they–much like Techno itself–are concerned with the limits of subject, author, and representation. However, I do not want authoritatively to prescribe a proper way of reading. Readers are welcome to proceed by associations or to otherwise make productive use of the interstices among these references. Thus, drawing from various discourses, this paper itself partakes in Techno’s strategy of sampling, of putting heterogeneous elements into a new context. The tracks I have included are mostly from the Techno/Dance Act The Prodigy, whose album Music For The Jilted Generation shall serve as a kubernetes, as a steering device providing thematic anchoring points in what follows. One might argue that such an analysis of Techno would yield better insights if it focused on a more underground Techno artist, one that has not already become a staple of MTV. But, as I hope to make clearer, I have chosen The Prodigy precisely because their album marks the precarious position on the cusp between what’s still underground and what’s already commercial, between “enacting the ineffable” and “making sense.”

 

So, I’ve decided to take my work back underground, to stop it falling into the wrong hands… (The Prodigy, “Intro”)

The Prodigy, “Intro,” Music for the Jilted Generation.
Sound file in Quicktime .MOV format.
Apart from evoking (at least to my mind) a strangely familiar William-S.-Burroughs-feeling, these words–taken from the “Intro” track of The Prodigy’s Music For The Jilted Generation–address two issues that will figure importantly in my reading of the phenomenon “Techno.” First, they evoke the prominent sound-metaphor of modernism, the typewriter, and thereby relate Techno to the realm of writing, the realm of the text, of differentiality as opposed to the presence of the voice. Second, the passage opens up the question of the differentiation of underground and official culture, of the political relevance of Techno–in short, of the position of Techno music as an art form in relation to society as a system of regulations.

 

Rock ‘n’ Roll culture has always defined itself in terms of phallic sex and:or deviance (to the law, to the common sense and its aesthetics). The last two decades have witnessed a decisive shift, and I will shortly contrast what I consider two of the main traits within mainstream music culture. On the one hand, although the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Elvis Presley) and his smudgy, deviant but true heirs (Sid Vicious/Johnny Thunders) have died, the revival of both Rock ‘n’ Roll and The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle nevertheless goes on and on. In contrast to Rock, Hip-Hop or Rap do not have an ideal (freedom/peace/love&sex) as either starting or terminal point, an ideal that even in its impossibility might serve as “authentic” music’s signified (e.g., the suicide of Kurt Cobain). They start from the fact of ghetto (tribe), digitalisation, segregation, a situation that might change for the better, but also–more likely–for the worse. Nevertheless, the discourses of Hip-Hop and Rap still operate on the level of the outspoken signified, on the level of the message, of lyrics² (preferably “explicit” and labeled with a Parental Advisory). Though their music functions like a machine, it is still the soundtrack to black-and-white videos documenting the need for social change, and thus still operates within an oppositional paradigm.

 

During the last decade, yet another style has evolved: Techno, a style even less associated with “natural” instruments like guitar, bass, and drum-set, but with segments of the frequency spectrum on the monitor of the analyzer; not with real time and live-performance, but with a step-by-step stratification of rhythms, samples, digital filters, and delay effects, a style that has its roots in Chicago “(Ware)House” style and Detroit DJ culture, that takes machines (records, turn-tables, computers) and uses them in ways they were not meant to be used, thus introducing techniques of “ab-use” (scratching, sampling etc.)–a point where the two “different” strands of music momentarily touch, since even Punk and Heavy Metal use distorted sounds, sounds in which the effect of (formerly unwanted) noise was in fact taken as a definians of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

 

Techno’s social relevance was highlighted in Great Britain’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, Chapter 33 (CJPO). Thus, the English Law was the first to provide an “official” definition of Dance and Techno Music and to regulate the handling of this kind of music. This Act aimed at the deviant behavior not only of ravers, but of squatters, travelers, etc. as well, people whose life-style is not one of conformity/uniformity. The section that criminalizes raves and Techno music deserves to be quoted in its full length:

 

Powers to remove persons attending or preparing for a rave.

 

Section 63. (1) This section applies to a gathering on land in the open air of 100 or more persons (whether or not trespassers) at which amplified music is played during the night (with or without intermissions) and is such as, by reason of its loudness and duration and the time at which it is played, is likely to cause serious distress to the inhabitants of the locality; and for this purpose--

 

(a) such a gathering continues during intermissions in the music and, where the gathering extends over several days, throughout the period during which amplified music is played at night (with or without intermissions); and

 

(b) "music" includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats. (CJPO)

 

The Law speaks from the position of those who know that one sleeps at night, who know that loud music causes aggression, and who share the mythical belief that “music is (or has to be) natural.” In contrast, this machinic “emission of a succession of repetitive beats” truly deserves to be put in ironic quotation marks. A deviator from the routines of normality and an adversary against The Law of a “natural/organic music” “commits an offence and is liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding three months or a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale” (CJPO 63.6b). The Law again appears as the instance of Lacan’s nom du père, as the castrating agency, as “Daddy says NO!” The Law has thus branded Techno as deviant, like a father who disclaims any parenthood for this disobedient, machinic child. It is indeed the very complicity of childishness and a machinic logic that will be the central perspective in my reading of Techno.

 

As a starting point, I want to redirect you once more to the Lacanian epigraph beginning this essay. The duplicity Lacan highlights between childishness and logic figures prominently in the very name of The Prodigy. What is a prodigy? The OED gives a whole range of possible answers:

 

• Something extraordinary from which omens are drawn; an omen, a portent.
• An amazing or marvelous thing; esp. something out of the ordinary course of nature; something abnormal or monstrous.
• Anything that causes wonder, astonishment or surprise; a wonder, a marvel.
• A person endowed with some quality which excites wonder; esp. a child of precocious genius.

 

Derived from the Latin prodigium, which denotes an omen in either a good or a bad sense, the English word prodigy thus combines two opposite meanings: the benevolent wonder and the abnormal monstrosity. Both meanings collide in the notion of the infant prodigy, a curious hybrid that combines the wisdom of a teacher with the age of a pupil. Relevant for my analysis is the possibility to read the notion of “the prodigy” as a nodal point of four discourses: signification (“an omen”); the evil and the abject (“something abnormal or monstrous”); magic (“a wonder, a marvel”); and childhood (in connection with genius).
Following these different traits, I will start with the two oft-quoted infant prodigies of psychoanalytical theory: Freud’s grandson Ernst, “inventor” of the fort/da-game, and the child prodigy in Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter,” as rendered and “used” by Jacques Lacan.

 

In Poe’s story, Dupin gives the example of a young schoolboy who continuously wins the game of “even and odd” by means of a “thorough identification” with his opponent (166). In his reading of this scene, Lacan stresses the fact that there is more at stake here than mere chance-guessing. Such an inter-subjectivity would remain in a purely imaginary realm, in a relation of “equivalence of one and the other, of the alter ego and the ego” (Seminar II 181). Lacan shows that the infant prodigy’s perfect identification with the opponent involves something else, a recourse to the symbolic register, and thus to an operating principle, a law, rather than to something “real.” It is the signifying chain and its laws that determine the effects of subjectivity, because of some kind of inherent machinic “remembering [remémoration]” (Seminar II 185) of the symbolic: “[f]rom the start, and independently from any attachment to some supposedly causal bond, the symbol already plays, and produces by itself, its necessities, its structures, its organizations” (Seminar II 193). By contrasting the real and the symbolic, Lacan situates Poe’s story against the background of combinatorial analysis, when he claims that “[t]he science of what is found at the same place [the real] is substituted for by the science of the combination of places as such” (Seminar II 299): cybernetics, “the fact that anything can be written in terms of 0 and 1” (Seminar II 300)–or: even and odd. Thus, the symbolic itself is technology, is the machinic–culture/the law as the automaton–and speaking human beings are cyborgs from the word go.

 

The human being’s entrance into the machinic is playfully experienced by another child prodigy, Freud’s grandson Ernst. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes his observations of his grandson’s self-invented game.

 

What he did was to hold [a wooden reel] by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive “o-o-o-o.” He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful “da” [“there”]. This, then, was the complete game–disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself…. (18:15).

 

Lacan stresses the fact that in the so-called fort/da-game a rudimentary use of language–a first phonematic opposition–is implicated. For the speaking subject–being constituted by this “original” digitality [fort/da, 0/I) and inscribed into a trans-subjective (rather than inter-subjective) system–an outside of digitality is impossible. It might be argued that there is something in the human subject that is not reducible to pure digitality: its indestructible drive (for a presymbolic state). Lacan highlights the “immortal… irrepressible life” (Four Fundamental Concepts 198) of the drive energy in his myth of the lamella. The lamella is thus the human being as pre-sexual, pre-subject substance, of a “life that has need of no organ” (Four Fundamental Concepts 198). Lacan gives a very vivid image of it: “The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba…. And it can run around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep…” (Four Fundamental Concepts 197). This illustration of the lamella reads like a perfect description of the cover of The Prodigy’s Music For The Jilted Generation. (See Figure 1.) It depicts this very balanced moment when the extra-flat lamella gives way to the clear-cut physiognomy of the subject, the (symbolic) “body with organs,” when the “unspeakable” gives way to and disappears in articulation.

 

Figure 1. The Prodigy, Music for the Jilted Generation. Used by permission.

 

Lacan’s remark that desire is “borne by death” (Écrits 277) suggests that desire is inevitably dependent on the symbolic register (and thus on an Oedipal complex of castration/death), notwithstanding the fact that desire is also precisely that which escapes language, that which is always remaindered in utterance. For Lacan, “the moment in which desire becomes human is also that in which the child is born into language” (Écrits 103). Thus, the fort/da-game enacts the very moment in which the pure, real jouissance of the body of the drives is replaced by the culturally acceptable (and thus castrated) phallic, symbolic jouissance of desire (what Lacan calls jouis-sens): a desire that is human by the very act of tying the human subject to the phallic machinic whose oedipal “molar machines” (Deleuze and Guattari 286) function according to the shared hierarchies of Western phallogocentrism. Desire is thus directed (however impossibly) to a signified, its metonymic drift propelling forward along the culturally loaded and Lawful chain of signifiers: “Daddy says YES!”

 

But there is yet another machine, a machine like the one that underlies the soundtrack of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. A strange, disturbing machine always underlying the cultural machine, in the same manner that the signifier always underlies the signified, that reminds “the signified [that it] is originarily and essentially… always already in the position of the signifier” (Derrida, Of Grammatology73). These machines are described by Deleuze/Guattari as

 

desiring machines, which are of a molecular order...: formative machines, whose very misfirings are functional... chronogeneous machines engaged in their own assembly (montage),... machines in the strict sense, because they proceed by breaks and flows, associated waves and particles, associative flows and partial objects.... (286-7)

 

Thus, molar machines are molecular machines under certain “determinate conditions” (Deleuze and Guattari 287), two “states” of one and the same machine. In a similar manner, Derrida shows how the deferring agency of writing as tekhne–as “a machine… defined in its pure functioning, and not in its final utility, its meaning, its result” (Margins 107)–is implicitly at work in the very realm that tries to suppress it–the spoken word and the living memory. Derrida focuses, for example, on the indeterminate ambiguity of the term pharmakon³: “I got the poison, I got the remedy” (The Prodigy, “Poison”).

The Prodigy, “Poison,” Music for the Jilted Generation.
Sound file in Quicktime .MOV format. 

Thus, beside the obvious reading, referring to yet another disillusioned youth, the “jilted generation” of the title of The Prodigy’s album might be (mis)read in terms of the dismissed mode of production of the “pure/desiring machine,” of the tekhne of writing as an endless signifying chain.

 
Though Lacan is more directly engaged with theorizing the subject than are Deleuze and Guattari (whose work is more concerned with lines of force and, ultimately, politics), one might tentatively draw an analogy between Lacan’s differentiation of pre-oedipal “drive” from post-oedipal “desire” and Deleuze and Guattari’s differentiation of the “pure/molecular machine” from the “operational/molar machine.” Underneath the regulated drift of desire, there is the rhythmic pulsation of the drives, constituting what Julia Kristeva calls “the semiotic” (Revolution 24).⁴ The drive itself, as a machine good for nothing (like the objects of Jean Tinguely), is described by Lacan in terms of a surrealist collage: “the working of a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap, a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful” (Four Fundamental Concepts 169).

 

This visual image, I argue, could be related–via the dadaist sound-collage–to the sampling technique of Techno and Acid House music (or to William S. Burroughs’s sound cut-ups for that matter, as described in Nova Express). Techno, in its decidedly a-political self-fashioning, nevertheless takes part in subversion. Not a subversion as decidedly against The Law, against its mode of communication, but a subversion that forces signification against itself, foregrounding the signifier against the signified. Achim Szepanski, owner and founder of the labels Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux, has explained that in Techno, “you can hear a multitude of noises, shrieks, chirps, creaks, and whizzes. These are all sounds traditionally associated with madness…. Techno in this sense is schizoid music: it deconstructs certain rules and forms that pop-music has inflicted on sounds, on the other hand it has to invent the rules that subject sounds to operations of consistency” (137-142, 140-1; my translation). By insisting on the unreasonable sounds beyond meaning, Techno sets the polymorphous drive of pre-oedipal childhood against repressive, phallic desire. In The Prodigy’s “Jericho,” for example, the term “childhood” is to be understood as the pre-oedipal realm of unrestricted freedom and bodily pleasure posed against post-oedipal adulthood; here, Techno aims to become pure tekhne-machine.

The Prodigy, “Jericho,” Experience.
Sound file in Quicktime .MOV format. 

It is not a “Rage against the machine” from the (however illusory) position of an non-machinic other,⁵ but a “Rage of the (pure) machine against the (oedipal) machine,” a “rage against the Symbolic” (Kristeva, Abjection 178, emphasis in the original). Not from the position of either one or the other, not from a position of either side within difference, but from the chiastic position of difference itself, from the difference at the “origin” of the symbolic: the law of the signifier against The Law of the signified (which is the law of the signifier under determinate conditions): “Fuck ’em and Their Law” (The Prodigy, “Their Law,” emphasis added).

 

The Prodigy, “Their Law,” Music for the Jilted Generation.
Sound file in Quicktime .MOV format. 

The promise of a return to the pre-oedipal and un-castrated realm of childhood also lies at the heart of Jaron Lanier’s manifestofor Virtual Reality, a field closely related to Techno music, as can be seen both in Techno video clips and in the use of computer animated images at Techno raves:

 

All of us suffered a terrible trauma as children that we’ve forgotten, where we had to accept the fact that we are physical beings and yet in the physical world where we have to do things, we are very limited. The thing that I think is so exciting about virtual reality is that it gives us this freedom again. It gives us this sense to be who we are without limitation…. (qtd. in Wooley 14)

 

The close relationship between Techno and a “retroactive childhood” (that is: belatedly from within the adult symbolic, that is: from within the digital) is I think effectively staged in the “fashion image” of “your average raver”: comfortable shoes with bouncy soles, oversized shirts, and baggy trousers are a kind of working-outfit from an active raver’s point of view. As a result, the wearer looks like a full-grown toddler, promoting an image that seems to indicate a refusal to grow up, a refusal to accept the rational/restrictive world of the adults.

 

This utopia of childhood revisited is expressed for example in German Techno DJ Marusha’s cover-version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”⁶ Significantly, this is a Techno remake, not an “original” song. It functions not to regain an analog paradise but rather to reveal and celebrate paradise as an effect of the digital machine.⁷ The “original” song was featured in the movie The Wizard of Oz, a movie that itself relates the reality of the childish dream-world to the functioning of a machine: the big, steaming “illusion-machine” of the (fake) Wizard. Techno and VR now add a crucial ingredient: the pre-oedipal is always already machinic, the machine is the limit, but the limit of the machine, its basic formula 0/1, can be repeated endlessly. Thus, it seems only “natural” that the “individual piece” of Techno music as a pure signifier, as a collage of various signifiers, forms a signifying chain in itself, drifts from remix to remix, creates “Loops of Infinity”⁸: as for the pure want of the abject writer, Techno’s “signifier… is [nothing] but literature” (Kristeva, Abjection 5), that is, nothing but the signifying chain itself. Techno is not designed to form an oeuvre, and the artists and DJs of Techno music definitely and consciously belong to the post-author (and post-song-writer) era. This is due not only to the democratization of the artistic process wrought by Techno’s more affordable instruments, but also to the “open character” of Techno music itself, which, since it precludes any final, authentic mix, renders impossible, or at least paradoxical, the very notion of a Techno “classic.” Being more serial than serious, Techno is able to proliferate endlessly, and, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle has convincingly argued with respect to Gilles Deleuze, “proliferation is always a threat to order” (95).

 

The repetitiveness of the machinic is thus the distinctive characteristic of Techno music, not only on the level of this signifier’s circulation (and distribution), but on the level of the individual piece (as an abstraction) as well, since this music consists of “sounds wholly or predominantly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats,” as stated by The Law. As in Freud’s grandson’s fort/da-game, which was “repeated untiringly,” repetition of the “fundamental difference” (fort/da, 0/I) is the rule of the game. This, I argue, is true for Techno music as well. Furthermore, it is its repeatability that makes a rule a rule, that makes a law a law. A way to contrast these two laws: the law of the signifier and The Law of the signified (which–in the end–are one and the same), is to take recourse to chaos theory, more precisely, to the notion of the fractal. As Brian Massumi has noted in his Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, a fractal, “in spite of its infinite fissuring, looks like and can function as a unified figure if we adopt an ontological posture toward it” (22). If this notion is related to the endless play of signifiers, the signified–as an effect of the signifier–can be related to what Massumi calls a “diagram”: “The diagram is drawable, but only if the fissuring is arbitrarily stopped at a certain level (produced meaning as evaporative end effect… momentary suspension of becoming)” (22). The Law of the signified is thus only an actualization of the law of the signifier: as such, it is a “dead fractal,” an effect of what it wants to, but cannot, suppress.

 

The realm of childhood thus seems to pose a serious threat to the restrictions and laws of society. Georges Bataille, in an essay on Wuthering Heights in his book on Literature and Evil, on Literature asEvil, comments on the contrast between these two worlds:

 

[S]ociety contrasts the free play of innocence with reason, reason based on the calculation of interest. Society is governed by its will to survive. It could not survive if these childish instincts... were allowed to triumph. Social constraint would have required the young savages to give up their innocent sovereignty; it would have required them to comply with those reasonable adult conventions which are advantageous to the community. (18)

 

Thus, anything that is “likely to cause serious distress to the inhabitants of the locality,” that is, the community, is a force operative against the Good.

 
By equating benefit with profit, the Good with reason, Bataille can say that what is at stake is a “revolt of Evil against Good. Formally it is irrational. What does the kingdom of childhood… signify if not the impossible and ultimate death” (19-20). This revolt has to be irrational, un-reason-able, “stupid” by definition, because what is at stake is not a question of the immoral against the moral: evil is understood here as “hypermorality” (Bataille 22), something a-moral rather than immoral (and morality can be taken here in the Nietzschean sense of a thinly disguised craving for profit). Thus, a revolt from an other position always already functions within the realm of The Law, acknowledging and strengthening the very opponent it wants to fight. Bataille compares the difference between the hypermoral and the immoral by quoting Sartre on the difference between an atheist and a satanist:

 

The atheist does not care about God because he has decided once and for all that He does not exist. But the priest of the black mass hates God because He is respectable; he sets himself to denying the established order, but, at the same time, preserves this order and asserts it more than ever. (qtd. in Bataille 35)

 

To put it another way: a rage against the machine by something non-machinic, by authentic Rock ‘n’ Roll (or Punk, for that matter), is bound to fail from the beginning. Because of the fact that it is reasonable, it is immediately incorporated by the reason-machine. A revolt thus has to be stupid, libidinal, childish, but, crucially, machinic. Thus, the “revolt of Evil against Good” is not merely a revolt of digital against analog but a battle, such as Derrida suggests, between the signifier-machine and the signified-machine, between the semiotic and the symbolic, the machine-that-acknowledges-being-a-machine and the machine-that-claims-to-be-natural. Techno is regarded as un-natural (as against natural music with natural instruments). This perspective claims nature and the machinic as oppositions and represses the fact that once within the symbolic (culture), the machinic is our most natural condition. In Wuthering Heights, then, the already socialized enunciations of the Linton kids–“Oh, mamma, mamma! Oh, papa! Oh, mamma, come here! Oh, papa, oh!” (90)–are not opposed by any reasonable counter-arguments or comments like “No, not mamma! No, not papa!”, but by “frightful noises” (90), the Romantic equivalent of the “repetitive beats” of present-day Techno.⁹

 

Whereas the concepts of cyberspace and VR celebrate the sovereignity of childhood without the body–the death of the body is in fact the price to re-visit paradise–Techno celebrates “Judgment Night” as the re-surrection of the body; it puts the body back into its place. A place determined not by biological parameters, that is, by the real, but by symbolic parameters that go a step further than the Lacanian definition of the the subject (“a signifier representing a subject for another signifier”). In analogy to Félix Guattari’s re-definition of the Lacanian objet a as an “objet-machine petit ‘a,” (115), the subject is constituted in “a pure signifying space where the machine would represent the subject for another machine” (117-8). Whereas the Lacanian objet a is a fragment of the real (body), that “pound of flesh” exchanged for the signifier, in a Techno rave the body as a whole is–not replaced–but “affected” by the machinic: Techno thus transforms the whole body into the “objet-machine petit ‘a.'”¹⁰ In this “final corporate colonization of the unconscious,”¹¹–that unconscious that is the “secret of the speaking body” (Lacan, Encore 118; translation mine) and that “engineers, is machinic” (Anti-Oedipus 53)–body and machine become one.

 

With respect to Techno, there have been a multitude of references to shamanism, tribalism, modern primitivism, and Voodoo-magic.

 

The Prodigy, “Voodoo People,” Music for the Jilted Generation.
Sound file in Quicktime .MOV format. 

It was Arthur C. Clarke who supposedly said that “any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (qtd. in Hafner and Markoff 11).¹² Thus, hackers, cyberpunks, techno artists, and other (mis)users of computer technology are the new magicians of our age, the shamans and Voodoo-priests of technology.

 
In connection with the ravers’ use of a drug aptly called Ecstasy, all these references collide in the notion of dance as ritual. Whereas the dancing body has been traditionally seen as a means of “natural” (self-)expression, in Techno-, Goa-, and Trance-Dance, the body moves beyond the pose and the object of the (male) gaze: “dance” might be defined here as the relation of the body to the machinic. Lacan has called cybernetics the “science of empty places” (Seminar II 300), and Techno raves, as a kind of “gay cybernetics,” to misuse a Nietzschean term, make much use of empty spaces such as industrial sites, warehouses, and factories. Jean Baudrillard has argued that the modern city (or its icon, the factory) is no longer “a site for the production and realisation of commodities” (77). It has become “a site of the sign’s execution” (119). Thus, it might be no coincidence that just at the moment the factory as such disappears, Techno usurps the empty places with its “signifier factory,” with a production that is good for nothing.

 

In addition to the notion of pre-oedipal childhood and the pleasure of the body, of the polymorphously perverse drives, which is experienced most directly in Dutch Gabba and Hardcore-Techno, there is the experience of trance and ecstasy prevalent in Goa/Ambient-Techno (which is not to say that Gabba does not have its spiritual merits). Still, the terror of speed and repetitive beats is related to the evil and the abject, as a border between the human and the purely physical, whereas the Zen-like experience of trance could be related to the sublime, the border between the human and the metaphysical/spiritual. Both point towards what Lacan calls a “jouissance beyond the phallus” (Éncore 81): mysticism.¹³ This certain kind of experience gives access to the jouissance of the body which we have taken to be forever lost as a result of castration. This experience can ironically never be put into words as such (despite the fact that this ineffability centers the poetic discourse it creates). Here I see a main reason why The Prodigy (and other Techno artists using message-fragments) are not regarded as “pure Techno” anymore: by returning, at least partly, to the realm of the signified, The (infant) Prodigy turns into a Prodigal Son.¹⁴ However, it was exactly the borderline-position of Music for the Jilted Generation that made it valuable for my reading of Techno.

 

Georges Bataille, drawing connections between the evil, lawless sovereignty of childhood, primitivism, and mysticism, states that “[d]eath alone–or, at least, the ruin of the isolated individual in search of happiness in time–introduces that break without which nothing reaches the state of ecstasy” (26). In the unity of ravers, the subject functions not as identity but as part of a bigger system, part of the machine. It has to be noted, nevertheless, that this unity is not structured by a phallic signifier, by God or a Führer. Some critics have pointed out that the rhythmic structure of Techno shares certain similarities with fascist Marschmusik. As an “empty signifier” Techno might be “neutral,” but the danger is that this signifier might be “filled” with either left or right ideology. In the “raving society,” the individual loses itself, and it longs for the continuity of this moment of disruption. However, this continuity is not one of duration, but one of rhythm, the rhythm of the endless oscillation between I and O (that is: one and zero, I and Other, fort and da), the machinic and the primitive/spiritual.

 

I want to finish by again quoting Georges Bataille on mysticism. The following quotation can be taken as an apt description of Techno, the music of a jilted generation that uses the regalia of hippiedom (“Love Parade”), a music that “drifts free and peacefully above the cold volcanoes of beat-music” (Diederichsen 278; my translation): “Mysticism is as far from the spontaneity of childhood as it is from the accidental condition of passion. But it expresses its trances through the vocabulary of love. And contemplation liberated from discursive reflection has the simplicity of a child’s laugh” (Bataille 27)–“hahahahahahaha hahahahahahaha…”

 

Winx, “Don’t Laugh,” Left Above the Clouds.
Sound file in Quicktime .MOV format. 

Notes

 

1. See for example various articles in magazines such as i-D; Spex etc., or publications such as E.V. Chromaparke, ed., Localizer 1.0: The Techno House Book; Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture; Steve Redhead, ed., Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture; M. Collin and J. Godfrey, Altered States: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House; N. Saunders and R. Doblin, Ecstasy: Dance, Trance and Transformation; and Bruce Eisner, Ecstasy: The MDMA Story.

 

2. See Russell Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Potter understands Hip-Hop as a political practice, a “signifyin(g)” practice in Henry Louis Gates’s sense, with its “Black English” as a vernacular of resistance.

 

3. See “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination: “writing, the pharmakon, the going or leading astray.”

 

4. Kristeva links the semiotic to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the “schizophrenic flow” qua modern literature–which both Kristeva and Deleuze/Guattari use as examples “in which the ‘flow’ itself exists only through language, appropriating and displacing the signifier to practice within it the heterogeneous generating of the ‘desiring machine'” (Revolution 17).

 

5. See the CD of the American crossover band Rage Against the Machine (1992), which proudly states on the cover that “no samples, no keyboards or synthesizers were used in the making of this recording.”

 

6. The duplicity of Techno and “modernist music” with respect to childhood is alluded to in Else Kolliner’s analysis of Igor Stravinsky’s “infantilism.” She states that Stravinsky’s music creates a “new realm of fantasy… which every individual once in his childhood enters with closed eyes.” Stravinsky’s techniques of “the stubborn repetition of individual motives–as well as the disassembling and totally new recomposition of their elements… are instrumentally accurate translations of child-like gestures of play into music” (“Remarks on Stravinsky’s ‘Renard,'” quoted by Adorno, 162-3).

 

7. Since I have related the “pure machine”/Techno to Julia Kristeva’s concept of the “semiotic” earlier on, I would like to add Kristeva’s warning not to confuse the semiotic with the analog: “this heterogeneity between the semiotic and the symbolic cannot be reduced to computer theory’s well-known distinction between ‘analog’ and ‘digital'” (Revolution 66).

 

8. This is the title of a track by the German Techno-artist Cosmic Baby.

 

9. Cathy and Heathcliff are observing the Lintons through the window of Thrushcross Grange’s, and this window pane serves as a translucent barrier between the realm of childhood and the realm of society, of etiquette, a barrier that would have to be destroyed or crushed from within in order to return to childhood again.

 

The Prodigy, “Break and Enter,” Music for the Jilted Generation.
Sound file in Quicktime .MOV format. 

10. For Deleuze/Guattari, “desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression” (Anti-Oedipus 26). If, according to Lacan, the object a is the “stuff” (Écrits 315) of the subject, then, in that “pure signifying space,” where the subject as subject is missing, it is in fact the objet-machine petit “a” that is the stuff of the “subject.” I am indebted to Hanjo Berressem for this observation; cp. his Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text, 77-8n9.

 

11. Title of an Ambient/Trance CD by Drome (1993).

 

12. Quoted in Katie Hafner and John Markoff, 11. The references to the loa and other Voodoo rituals in William Gibson’s Neuromancer offer another case in point. For the notion of tribalism and new primitivism, see Techno sub-genres such as Tribal Dance and Jungle.

 

13. An obvious liaison between Techno and mysticism could be observed in the trend of merging Gregorian Chants or Hildegard von Bingen’s “Canticles of Ecstasy” with Techno Beats. For another example, watch the video-clip of Scubadevil’s “Celestial Symphony,” which features film sequences of religious rituals and fade-ins of possible combinations of 0 and I. As an expanded metaphor of the Information-Super-Highway and in analogy with Rock ‘n’ Roll culture as an extended metaphor of the street, the two variants of Techno–the abject and the sublime–can be read as the “Information-Super-Highway to Hell” and the “Information-Super-Stairway to Heaven.”

 

14. See Kodwo Eshun’s “Prodigal Sons,” where he contrasts the “pre-adolescence” (34) of The Prodigy’s debut, an “aural equivalent of [Lacan’s] mirror stage” (34), with the attempt of their latest album to “put hardcore’s adrenalin thrill into stadium rock” (33).

 

Works Cited

 

• Adorno, Theodor. Philosophy of Modern Music. Trans. A.G. Mitchell and W.V. Blomster. London: Sheed & Ward, 1987.
• Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. Trans. A. Hamilton. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1990.
• Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. Ian H. Grant. London: SAGE Publications, 1995.
• Berressem, Hanjo. Pynchon’s Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993.
• Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.
• Chromaparke, E.V. ed., Localizer 1.0: The Techno House Book. Art Books Intl. Ltd., 1996.
• Collin, M. and J. Godfrey. Altered States: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. Serpent’s Tail, 1997.
• Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. London: HMSO, 1994.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.
• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
• —. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. A. Bass. Brighton: Harvester, 1986.
• —. Dissemination. Trans. B. Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
• Diederichsen, Diedrich. Freiheit macht arm. Das Leben nach Rock ‘n’ Roll 1990- 93. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993.
• Eisner, Bruce. Ecstasy: The MDMA Story. Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing, 1993.
• Eshun, Kodwo. “Prodigal Sons,” i-D 135 (December 1994): 32-37.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. 24 vols. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953-74.
• Guattari, Félix. Molecular Revolution. Trans. R. Sheed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984.
• Hafner, Katie and Markoff, John. Cyberpunk. Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
• Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
• —. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan Livre XX, Encore, 1972-73. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975.
• —. Écrits. A Selection. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.
• —. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1978.
• —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psycho-Analysis 1954-55. Trans. S. Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.
• Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire. La Salle: Open Court, 1985.
• Massumi, Brian. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993.
• Poe, E.A. The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Random House, 1944.
• Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: SUNY, 1995.
• Redhead, Steve, ed. Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture. Brookfield, VT: Avebury, 1993.
• Reynolds, Simon. Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1998.
• Saunders, N., and R. Doblin, Ecstasy: Dance, Trance and Transformation. Oakland, CA: Quick American Archives, 1996.
• Szepanski, Achim. “Den Klangstrom zum Beben bringen.” Techno. Hrsg. Philipp Anz/Patrick Walder. Zürich: Ricco Bilger, 1995
• Wooley, Benjamin. Virtual Worlds. A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992.

Sound-Bites

 

• The Prodigy. “Jericho.” Experience. Elektra, 1992.
• —. Music For The Jilted Generation. XL Recordings,1994:
  • “Intro”
  • “Their Law”
  • “Poison”
  • “Voodoo People”
• Winx. “Don’t Laugh.” Left Above the Clouds. XL Recordings, 1996.