So last week I read Drew Daniel's excellent Throbbing Gristle book 20 Jazz Funk Greats (Continuum), and directly afterward spent 21 hours watching noise live at the Knitting Factory for the No Fun Fest. Yesterday I turned in yet another NIN piece, this time for the LA Weekly, and so all revolves right now around the noise/industrial nexus and my blossoming (re)interest in what it means to listen to and participate in so called transgressive art. I want to share this bit from Drew's book, which is part of the chapter on the song "Convincing People," because it reveals something that bothers me about the contemporary noise scene, which I see as very much the inheritor of the values Genesis et al. founded, however ironically given the context of this extended quote:
It is politically useful to ciruclate the cynically enlightened fiction that domination can never really be contested, that all politicians are corrupt and therefore all are "equally" bad, and that therefore one's participation (in marketplaces, in electoral politics) is a sham because any attempt to choose between options legitimates the system as a whole. In his Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), Peter Sloterdijk contrasted 'cynicism,' the retreat of the 'enlightened' subject from the political into an Olympian disdain for such shabby matters, with 'kynicism,' a specifically working-class mode of mockery in which the hypocritical language of ruling powers was called to account, exposed as fiction and abused accordingly (as cited in Zizek, p. 29). They are both stances of "disbelief," but mere cynicism is negative, a withdrawal from politics into private tranquility, while "kynicism" is openly antagonistic, a radically engaged reaction to the collapse of meaningful options within the public sphere. Messages such as the Hipgnosis sleeve, which reinforce the notion that our choices don't make a difference so we might as well buy another record anyway, are in this practical sense cynical, and fundamentally conservative.
By contrast, I would like to suggest that the stance Throbbing Gristle take up in 'Convincing People' is not cynical but 'kynical.' By setting in motion a kind of 'liar's paradox' in which the attempt to persuade the listener and the attempt to arm the listener against persuasion are both revealed as equally untrustworthy, 'Convincing People' exudes a deep hostility to the rhetorical techniques and weapons of mass persuasion that underlie both pop marketing and party politics." (Daniel 2008:87-88)
The mocking is crucial here - the alienation the audience should feel from the staged events as a sort of moral play. Perhaps this is the pedantic tone that sometimes creeps into TG, something they've been taken to task for. Sometimes at noise shows I don't feel that alienation, but rather an intimacy, a longing for an idolatry of mad power, however fleeting - a brotherhood. Maybe that's the transgression - to feel that feeling, and have to pull one's self back and realize the ugly human potential lust for power lurking beneath?
