Steven
Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect addresses the way the shift between
classically liberal and neoliberal systems of social/artistic organization
plays out in film and 4D visual media (And, I'm working with the version printed in Film-Philosophy, because that's what I taught earlier this semester, and that's what I initially prepped these remarks from). He argues,
Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system
was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods
and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the
computing-and-information technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal
finance (3).
I
want to think through his concept of post-cinematic affect in order to figure
out what neoliberal cinema and neoliberal pop music have in common, and what
they don’t. My initial intuition is that medium matters: post-cinematic
4D media and extra-tonal pop might both be iterations of the same underlying
neoliberal program, but the context of their iteration likely alters the
program as it is articulated/realized in the medium. BUT, especially given the
homologous digital environments in which contemporary 4D viz media and music
are produced and consumed, the media—or, at least, the materiality of
the media—might not actually be that different. So if there are slight
variations between neoliberalism as 4D viz logic, and neoliberalism as 4D
musical logic, what’s the cause or source of these variations? I’m thinking the
source of differences between post-cinematic and extra-tonal might be the
different cultural contexts, habits, practices, etc., that shape the
production and consumption of viz and audio media. For example, mainstream
audiences can handle much more abstraction in music than they can in visual
media, it seems: various genres of electronica and hardcore metal approach
“absolute music,” but even something as ostensibly content-less as Transformers
still has a nominal plot, characters, etc. But we’ll see if all these
intuitions bear out.
First,
some terminological caveats: In the case of music, it can be really muddy to
call it “post-tonal” affect, because the term “post-tonal” already connotes and
denotes 20th c avant-garde art music practices like free atonality,
serialism, process music, minimalism, and so on. Because “post-tonal” is
already taken, I’ve used the term “extra-tonal” to indicate specifically
neoliberal departures from (classically liberal) tonality. But, “extra-tonal”
is kinda clunky, so I prefer Jacques Attali’s term “repetition” to describe this
regime of musical organization. My essay in The New Inquiry explains the
connection between Attalian repetition and neoliberalism. You can read all
about that there, so I’m not going to re-hash it here.
I’m
going to address specific concepts, breaking them down into sub-topics. This is
not really systematic at all, as this blog is, as usual, the first
working-through of my thoughts.
The
Sine Wave
Sound and light both exist as radiation, as sine waves. Music, at least when it
is heard by un-modified human ears, takes this form. The logic of the sine wave
(peak and valley, asymptotes, frequency and amplitude) is also the logic of
biopolitical neoliberalism—statistics, data profiles, etc., all these get
graphed as curves, like the peaks and valleys of a sine wave. The sine wave
just describes the unfolding, over time, of patterns of peaks and valleys
(rather than one atemporal statistical distribution around a norm, as in a bell
curve).
Shaviro appeals to the logic of the sine wave in
his analysis of Grace Jones’s “Corporate Cannibal” video. For example, even
though he’s talking about digital media—binary code, not actual analog
wavelengths—the binary code is, in his account, patterned like a sine wave. In
the video, “every event is translated into the same binary code, and placed
with in the same algorithmic grid of variations, the same phase space”
(14). Phase space is another term for frequency (on a wave, the space
from peak to peak, valley to valley, for example). So here code behaves like an
analog wavelength—because this logic of the sine wave is neoliberalism’s
logic. As Shaviro puts it, “Jones embodies capital unbound, precisely
because she has become a pure electronic
pulse” (31; emphasis mine). Electronic signals, like neoliberal capitalism, are
organized as sine waves. Biopolitical neoliberalism sets/constitutes the
“algorhithmic” or statistical grid lays out the “predetermined set of
possibilities” within which everything can be contained. So, neoliberal
post-cinematic viz media and extra-tonal/repetitive pop music are both
primarily digital media, but, because they are neoliberal, the digital
is organized or patterned like an analog sine wave. This is one way to read
Shaviro’s claim that “digital video is expressed in binary code, and treated by
means of algorithmic procedures, allowing for continual modulation of the image
(16). Basically, neoliberalism organizes media to work like “an electronic
signal whose modulations pulse across the screen” (16) or through the speakers.
Neoliberalism, as a biopolitical/statistical regime/episteme, is responsible
for this patterning. So, “Jones’s electronic modulations track and embrace the
transmutations of capital” not only because “video modulations and the
worldwide ‘culture of financial circulation are both driven by the same digital
technology” (31), but, more importantly, because they participate in the same
underlying episteme—the logic of the sine wave.
Sine waves have asymptotes—upper and lower
limits that can be approached in ever-more-exponentially narrow intervals
(think Zeno’s paradox), but never touched or crossed. Sine waves bounce between
upper and lower asymptotes. Shaviro explicitly identifies an “asymptotic
approach” as a “principle behind [the] formal organization of sounds and
images’ (88), in post-cinematic film. He also implicitly attributes the idea of
asymptote to post-cinematic cinema, speaking of, for example, structures that
“ru[n] repeatedly through a holding pattern” (88), or the ““state of teetering
on a precipice without actually falling over; or better, of falling over but
never finishing falling over, never quite hitting the ground” (87). His most
evocative description of neoliberalism’s asymptotic logic focuses on the “phase
space” or upper and lower asymptotes of a sine wave. A post-cinematic film
bounces back and forth between upper and lower limits, producing the
paradoxical affective texture
overloaded to the point of hallucination; yet at the same time it depicts a culture drained of vitality and on the brink of death. The movie exuberantly envisions the entropic dissipation of all energy and the implosion of social and media networks into a flat, claustrophobic, degree-zero banality. This end-point looks continually before us, but it is never quite reached” (88).
This
could just as well be a description of an EDM club set. In a more conventional
house set, a DJ will craft a large-scale arc: starting low, building and
building slowly to a climax, staying up for a little bit, and then coming down
at the end. It’s a teleological, developmental logic. EDM DJ sets generally
don’t develop, they just ping pong back and forth from high highs (“overloaded
to the point of hallucination”) to low lows (“the brink of death”). This
ateleological ping ponging also manifests in the smaller scale of the
individual radio mix or 12”, though usually EDM-Pop mixes in a little
teleology, in the form of the break (the break functions somewhat like a goal
or a climax, even though there’s no large-scale developmental arc leading up to
it). Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been” is a good example of this, as is Usher’s
“Numb.”
Asymptotes are also important in neoliberal
music because they the devices used to produce musical/affective pleasure. I’ve
talked a bit about this in my New Inquiry essay, but the basic idea is
that rhythm and timbre get exponentially intensified, approaching the upper
limit of intensity ever-and-ever more closely. This limit is both physiological
(just as we visually perceive 24-fps as one constant image, there’s an
audiological point at which we cease to perceive pitch (e.g., sounds so low we
only hear unpitched percussive clicks, not a continuous pitched frequency), and
technological (hardware and software have technological limits, e.g., amps
don’t generally go up to 11). Sometimes, the song gives us a big hit on a
downbeat before the asymptote is crossed; other times (e.g., in Gangnam Style),
the song gives a few beats or a measure of silence (implying the
percpetual/technological thresholds were crossed) before a big hit on a downbeat.
But, the build and hit is the song’s money shot, the big pleasurable moment in
the composition. In neoliberalism, or at least in contemporary neoliberal
musical practices, aesthetic pleasure is a matter of riding the crest of
burnout, of tarrying with upper (in EDM) and lower (in dubstep) thresholds.
The asymptote is important b/c it’s the threshold one tarries with.
So if riding the crest of burnout is a sort of
compositional strategy, then we need to think about specific tactics used to
carry this out. Here’s where techniques like fragmentation, “compositing” (as
opposed to montage), stuttering, modularity, etc., fit in. These are all formal
devices that, in classical and Modernist aesthetics, served to interrupt,
shock, and critique. But now they’re standard tricks that don’t at all disrupt,
interrupt, shock, or critique.
Modulation:
Following Deleuze,
Shaviro argues that “modulation…is a basic characteristic of digital processes
in general” (15). It “requires an underlying fixity, in the form of a carrier wave or
signal that is made to undergo a series of controlled and coded variations”
(14). Basically, modulation is the process of introducing superficial
variations in a system that is, at bottom, rigid. It gives the appearance of
flexibility while requiring an underlying conservatism and invariance. As in
Western jazz improve traditions, superficial flexibility and inventiveness
requires a rock-solid, invariant foundation. What is distinctive about
neoliberal “modulation is that the statistical/algorhithmic grid controls for
all possible risk: “no matter what happens, it can always be contained in
advance within a predetermined set of possibilities” (14). Biopolitical
neoliberalism determines those possibilities—that’s what the asymptotes of the
sine wave do: define limits you can approach but not cross. You also see this
logic at work in Cage’s Music of Changes: sure, it appears like there
are chance events happening, but the matrix Cage made based on the I Ching
pretty much determines the range of available possibilities; it’s the
“underlying fixity.” So, one thing modulation does is set out a range of
standardized deviations—it gives the illusion of autonomy, transgression, etc. Or,
as Steve Reich says, “Musical processes can give one…a kind of complete
control…By "a kind" of complete control I mean that by running this
material through the process I completely control all that results” (MGP). Reich’s
1968 essay “Music as a Gradual Process” actually speaks quite directly to the
same concepts and problems Shaviro identifies as “post-cinematic,” so perhaps
it’s neoliberalism itself that’s a “gradual process.”
Neoliberalism
as a Gradual Process:
Post-cinematic media is generative, unlike
cinema, which is indexical. Cinema is a document of what passed in front of a
camera IRL, so it “therefore always assumes—because it always refers back
to—some sort of absolute, pre-existing space” (17). Post-cinematic media, on
the other hand, do not refer their organizational plane to some external
sphere, but “generat[e their] own space, in the course of [their] own
modulations” (17). (This is also how Deleuze describes the plane of
composition, more or less.) Or, post-cinematic media generates its own
large-scale formal structure from the unfolding of moment-to-moment details. I
totally stole that phrasing from composer Steve Reich, and his notion of music
as a gradual process. Reich explains: “The distinctive thing about musical
processes is that they determine all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details
and the over all form simultaneously. (Think of a round or infinite canon.)”[i]
So for example take his Pendulum Music. In this piece, a microphone is
hung, via a long(ish) cord, over an amplifier, to which it is also plugged in.
The mic is a pendulum, which is released to swing back and forth over the amp,
generating feedback on each pass. There is no pre-existing score which the
sounds then express or represent; rather, the large-scale form of each
performance of Pendulum Music emerges from, is generated by the sound-to-sound,
moment-to-moment details. So, in post-cinematic media as in process music,
compositional logic “can only be apprehended bit by bit…and from moment to
moment, through the constructive action of ‘linking’ one space to another,
materially feeling one’s way from one space to another” (Shaviro 37). The large
scale form is generated by the moment-to-moment details. Is this a general
feature of neoliberalism? Well, yeah, I think so, especially b/c you can read
Harvey’s concept of “relational space” (which Shaviro calls on in the text) as
a similar mode of organization.[ii]
Reich’s “Music As A Gradual Process also has
some instructive suggestions about where we find moments of
not-already-co-opted/controlled-for deviation. When we take the time to microscopically
examine a specific iteration of a process piece (a specific generation), its
moment-to-moment details, we can perceive things that weren’t
accounted/controlled for in the original algorithm. As Reich explains,
Even when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unattended, psycho-acoustic by-products of the intended process. These might include sub-melodies heard within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to listener location, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, difference tones, etc…That area of every gradual (completely controlled) musical process, where one hears the details of the sound moving out away from intentions, occuring for their own acoustic reasons, is it.
Basically, at the point where data-streams
cross—when the sounds generated in the performance meet and interact with
material variables (in listeners, in performance enviornments,
etc.)—unpredicted effects can emerge. No control system accounts for
everything; sure, it can rapidly adapt to and co-opt emergent phenomena, but it
can never exhaustively capture each potential variable.
Reich
repeatedly emphasizes that these moments of genuinely unpredicted deviation
cannot be intentionally produced, predicted or willed: “While performing and
listening to gradual musical processes one can participate in a particular
liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process
makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you
and me outwards towards it.”
Part of the reason why these phenomena can’t be intended/willed is because they
are not subjective (he, she, you, me) phenomena; rather, they occur at the
level of populations, institutions, systems (or, as Deleuze might say, packs).[iii]
Contemporary
pop songs are microcosms of larger-scale neoliberal structures.
Shaviro argues that the
“difficult task, therefore, is to translate…the impalpable flows and forces of
finance into images and sounds that we can apprehend on the screen” (37).
Contemporary pop genres like EDM and dubstep actually do that work of
translation: they articulate or express the very “libidinal flows [that] are
coextensive with financial ones” (49), but in very concrete, non-abstract ways.
I’m going to be brief and somewhat schematic here:
1.
Because there is no teleological development, just the back-and-forth
between upper and lower limits of intensity, there is neither resolution nor
harmony (both very important in tonal music, both actually related: harmony is
what gets resolved). And it’s not so much a “sense that you never finish
anything” or of “endless postponements,” but rather that finishing or
postponement are non-issues. It doesn’t feel like a postponement because we’re
not expecting/listening for a “finish.” Or, as Shaviro puts it, “Worrying about
long-term prospects and consequences is a luxury that nobody can afford. In a
world of ‘just-in-time’ production, one cannot make more than ‘just-in-time’
plans” (53). If there’s no large-scale form except what the moment-to-moment
details tell us, then we can’t hedge our bets on some future payoff, because
the exact texture of that future is not determinable with sufficient precision.
2.
Instead of functionalist hierarchies, modularity: Tonal harmony is a
hierarchy of chord functions: tonic, dominant, sub-dominant, mediant, etc. Each
chord has a function (resolution, implication of resolution, delay/diversion
from resolution, etc.), and functions are all ordered hierarchically in
relation to a primary chord. Neoliberal music and cinema, like “financial
derivates[,] are ‘functionally indifferent’: they can be used to ‘price,’ and
thereby stand in for, the ‘risk’ implicit in any situation whatsoever…Things don’t need to harmonize, or fit
together” (Shaviro 53). Basically, by voiding functionality, the hierarchy
collapses (or by voiding the hierarchy, functionality collapses). Instead of
functional, organic wholes, compositions are arrangements (assemblages) of
modules. Modules can be arranged in any order, because there is no hierarchy of
functions that demands specific types of organization. With functionality
voided, the rise and fall in a song can’t be teleological, because there
is no clearly-defined goal or orienting center. In other words, there’s no
development, no cause-and-effect-like logic to the song’s unfolding through
various different elements/motives/etc. As in all Manovichian new media, “the
cutting-and-pasting of elements that are synchronically available in a database
replaces the suturing of shots that unfold diachronically” (Shaviro 79).
Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been” is a modular song; I discuss it here. Shaviro
calls this post-cinematic cutting-and-pasting digital compositing, and I
think it’s most evident, musically, in pop dubstep like Skrillex’s. Pop dubstep
composition is, in a way, the musical equivalent of Michael Bay’s
cinematography. According to Shaviro, “Bays’ films…eschew considerations of
continuity almost entirely, in favor of disjunctive cutting engineered so as to
maximize shock” (80). This shock-intensifying disjunctive cutting is an equally
apt description of Skrillex’s hit “Bangerang.”
Formal Diagram of “Bangerang”:
A: 4 measures
A1: 4 measures plus “shout to all my lost boys:
A2: A1 + additional synth + cymbal roll
B starts w/ first lite-drop
B
B
B
A1
A2.1
B
B
Bhalfprime
Bhalfprime
C (soar starts)
C
D (break)
D
A1.1 (soar for real)
A2.2
B (sort of drop, but not really a classic dubstep
drop b/c not in the bass bass)
B
B
B
E
3.
So how is brostep, exemplified here by “Bangerang,” analogous or
homologous with post-cinematic film?[iv] Let’s break
this down:
a.
The song is composed of samples or computer-generated patterns. Each
individual sample or looped synth motive is modular—it’s like the sonic
expression of a note written with letters cut out from different printed sources,
sorta like the Sex Pistols used on “God Save the Queen”.
There’s no
stylistic, aesthetic, or formal reason these sonic modules fit together, other
than the fact that Skrillex put them there in that order; the order is, in
other words, not following any sort of coherent external logic. As Shaviro
explains, this “additive” compositional style “overlays, juxtaposes and
restlessly moves between multiple images and sound sources. But it does not
provide us with any hierarchical organization of all these elements. Many of
the [song]’s most arresting [sounds] just pop up, without any discernible
motivation or point of view” (71). There is no centered or centering term; the
logic has no internal, inherent governing principle. So, unlike a melody, which
has a coherent logic from one moment to the next, “Bangarang”’s main musical
motives “read” like a document written with cut-out letters (or, in Shaviro’s terms,
with each letter in a different “window” (81). The main (i.e., not percussion)
line in the B sections of “Bangerang” are particularly clear examples of this
compositing technique/affect. There are wobbled bass effects, snips of vocal
samples (a scream, “we rowdy,” “bass,” and, of course, “bangerang”), stuttered
synth sounds, treble drops, a whole ton of different sounds and sound effects.
Each individual module is neither related nor unrelated to the ones on either
side of it, because continuity, coherence, all these higher-order operations
aren’t factors in the song’s musical composition. To paraphrase Shaviro, “the
[song]’s sheer density of incidents and references baffles our efforts to
‘translate’ what we see and hear into something more abstract, more
metaphorically palatable and easily manageable” (78). This means that the song “is entirely incoherent, and yet ‘immediately
legible to anyone’” (80); old Western standards of coherence just don’t hold
anymore. So, there’s a logic here, it’s just not one that privileges
“coherence.” The fact that this logic is so accessible is one thing that allows
this form or structure to “globalize” with ease—there’s no need to “translate”
it to local pop vernaculars, you can just take the formula and plug-and-chug.
It’s a turn-key shell. Similarly, Transformers can be global megahits
because of their “incoherence”: As Shaviro notes, “Bay makes films that are
utterly disjointed, and yet unfold in such a ‘smooth space’ that these
disjunctions scarcely matter to mass audiences” (80).
b.
So neither “Bangerang” nor Transformers
fell apart into utterly confusing nonsense; if they were nonsense, they were at
least digestable nonsense. What holds them together, or on what basis do these
works loosely hang together? Shaviro argues that in post-cinematic media, it’s
the soundtrack, particularly, the “spoken commentary [that] weaves together and makes
coherent what otherwise would seem to be an utterly random stream of images”
(82). In brostep, it’s not speech, but
the four-on-the-floor percussion that holds otherwise incoherent modules
together. (Hence the importance of the refrain qua, uh, refrain?). Brostep is
not truly generative; it’s obviously not process music. Rather, its
small-scale (4/4 meter) and large-scale (groups of 3 or 4 four-bar modules)
rhythmic and metric patterns that set the conditions/parameters within which
anything can happen.
c.
Now, obviously I need to go back and watch Transformers
and some other films to hash out further comparisons. But, working from the music
end, these seem to be important questions:
i. Is
there a post-cinematic equivalent of “the drop” (build to silence, then a big
bass hit on the next downbeat, usually with a pitch flourish downwards). Right
now I’m thinking of the skydiving scene in Abrams’ Star Trek, which is
both literally a “drop” and perhaps a cinematic drop, especially when paired
with “Sabotage”? Again, I need to think more about this. Or, if you have
suggestions, that would be great—I’m not at all a cinema person, so my
knowledge of potential examples is pretty limited here.
ii. Is
there a post-cinematic equivalent of wobble? Wobbling is a specific form
of modulation, one where an oscillator is used to create recurring patterns of
timbral distortion. More simply, wobbling is a way to put effects and fliters
on a bass signal to create a wob-wob-wob type sound. The oscillation creates
the affect of a bass signal wobbling back and forth. This definitely happens in
music videos, but movies I don’t know enough to make any claims on this count.
This is definitely happening in music videos (Rihanna’s “Where Have You
Been” again, Minaj’s “Pound The Alarm”). I don’t watch enough film to know if
this is happening in contemporary mainstream cinematography.
So
at this point I’m running up against the limits of my knowledge of flim. In
general I’m comfortable claiming that post-cinematic 4D media and “repetitive”
pop (EDM, dubstep, etc.) follow similar neoliberal logics. The
materiality/medium question is going to have to be put off for another post.
However, I think that there’s an argument that it’s actually the sine
wave that is the medium here—except in a very abstract, “virtual” (in the
Deleuzian sense) way—and this medium then gets taken up in different genres
(post-cinematic film, dubstep, etc.). So this might then
mean that it’s signal itself that’s the medium…which sort of makes
sense, right, given the fact that we’re talking mainly about digitally-produced
and consumed film and music. Music and 4D viz digi/electro work then become
different genres of the same underlying medium, and not so much distinct
art forms. If they remain distinct art forms, it’s due more to cultural
practice/convention, less to material difference.
[i] http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/draft/ben/feld/mod1/readings/reich.html
[ii] “Processes do not occur in space but define
their own spatial frame. The concept of space is embedded in or internal to
process…space varies from moment to moment, along with the forces that generate
and invest it” (17)
[iii] Improvisation,
on the other hand, is a more subjective concept.“The distinctive thing about
musical processes is that they determine all the note-to-note details and the
over all form simultaneously. One can't improvise in a musical process--the
concepts are mutually exclusive.” So it’s not the compositional form that is
“controlled,” but the conditions or system in which the compositional form
unfolds. This parallels Foucault’s claim in Birth of Biopolitics that
neoliberal economists didn’t seek to control the market itself, but the conditions
for the market’s functioning. Reich’s claim here also clarifies that
“improvisation”—a very beloved metaphor for individual freedom in liberal
democracy—doesn’t even make sense in neoliberal systems. Improv happens when
note-to-note details ornament a rigid underlying framework (like a 12-bar blues
in A); in process music, there is no underlying framework prior to or apart
from the note-to-note details.
[iv]
There’s also a sociological homology between brostep and Bay’s films: they’re
both basically targeting the same demographic, brah.
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