14
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Wildstyle in Full Effect
Robin Mackay
Guerrilla dance, guerrilla musicality, coming from anywhere, taking what
is needed.
(Two Fingers and Kirk 1995:191)
The increasing ubiquity of sound-recording technologies (essentially diagramming
or stratigraphical systems) has, in transforming sound into stored material,
deritualized and demystified the experience of music. Increasingly appreciated as
much for abstract sonic qualities as for ostensible musical ‘content’, able to employ
a vast range of sonic resources, ‘performed’ unceremoniously every day and
everywhere, music is drawing nearer to an immanence with general ambient sound.
At the same time, we are growing accustomed to the experience of absolutely
synthetic sound, sound only made possible by the recording technologies
themselves. Analysis of the production of machinic surplus value in such processes
and the exact fate of such excess machinic production provides a key cross-section
of the abstract machine of capitalist production and its future. On this route through
the phylum of the sonic assemblage, abstract matter becomes not only a
comprehensible and applicable term but an uncompromisingly tactile phenomenon.
Beginning with Capitalism and Schizophrenia’s insistence that the diagram is never
simply a tracing, or a representation, the key process of capitalist machinic
abstraction and its enslavement to the docilizing powers of consumer capitalism
can be approached through the sonic assemblage: the interaction between the human
body and the fundamental molecular disturbance which constitutes sound, and
the machines which interpose and mediate within it.
Hearing already presupposes a complex of syntheses, biological and
mnemotechnical apparatuses of capture. The function of memory in the feedback
247
Robin Mackay
loops of the simplest humanoid—sonic assemblage introduces the possibility of
continually sophisticating circuits of reception and transmission, the exploitation
of coded sound. Rhythmic disturbances become interpreted as traits of external
phenomena in recognition patterns where meaning can already be analysed into
signaletic frequency response:
All that can be inferred from a signal may appropriately be called the
‘meaning’ of this signal. Depending on the complexity of an organism’s
nervous system, the meaning of a signal can vary from a simple initiation of
a feeding response, that is, the signal means ‘food’, to a realization of the
most complicated relationships in an environmental situation.
(Foerster and Beauchamp 1969:7)
This may primarily be made possible by the production of a reliable method of
recording, for a stable storage system is necessary for such a process to take place.
That there are biological, even inert, recording technologies is established by
Capitalism and Schizophrenia’s ‘Geology of Morals’. Systems of Stratification, deducting
similar elements from a material flow and arranging them in resonantly ordered
compounds, produce stabilized, resistant matter. Therefore corporeal reality as
such is constituted as a gigantic memory, densely embedded synthetic compounds
differing in degrees of plasticity and modes of composition.
Although contemporary recording processes allow us consciously to treat sound
as a synthetic assemblage, there have been few attempts to discuss music in terms
of its machinic processing. Music would perhaps like to remain the stratified and
secretive reserve of soulful artists. Pragmatically, however, the field of sonic
production has provided an unparalleled fertility for strato-analytical procedures
to emerge and develop. Given the preponderance of interpretative ‘readings’ of
all manner of subjects, it is refreshing instead to be able to listen to strato-analysis
in action. Writing more often than not provides a system of recording whose ‘object
of study’, exploiting it parasitically, nonetheless surpasses it in terms of machinic
connectivity (this piece being no exception). The written word proves redundant,
disintensified and insufficiently plastic. An effective strato-analysis requires a system
of recording which fulfils the required criteria immanently without pretending
to a relationship of absolute objectivity, the theatre of representation, thus becoming
the writing of the State. A writing is required which operates on vectors directly
consistent with other matter. By listening to the strato-analysis achieved in the
sonic assemblage, steps can be taken towards such a writing-machine.
* * *
248
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
The musical division of sound into pitch and duration (the stave) deducts audible
vibrations, and folds the audible continuum at a threshold point (physically about
nineteen cycles per second, although the threshold is rarely explored), to form
two exclusive time-series which articulate sounds as complicit relations of content
and form. Pitch assigns a signifying value (note) to cyclical transformations of
molecular compression and rarefaction, and duration gives the metric length of
the tone, which positions it in relation to other tones, or ‘empty’ spaces.
Even phonography freezes intensive differences into extensive surface inscription,
disjoining intensity and duration. The recording made by a phonographic apparatus
depicts sound as a waveform etched onto a moving surface, with time and amplitude
(amount of molecular displacement) plotted perpendicularly. For any given sound,
pitch rises as duration is shortened, and duration is lengthened as pitch is lowered
(think of changing the speed of a record-player). Sounds become packaged objects
for the clockspace of a mechanical duration, two measures in reciprocal
presupposition, biunivocal time-series: one naming (pitch, amplitude), the other
counting (time signature, recording speed). Compressive/extensive (content/
expression). Double pincers locking into compensatory homoeostasis.
Vibrations are perceived through rapidly oscillating differences in pressure, the
measure of amplitude, and consequently the sensation of acoustic intensity, being
relative to a molecular equilibrium. The vibratory continuum plugs into the delta
and theta waves of the brain, into bodily sensation and ultimately into temperature,
at hyper- and sub-sonic values. Pitch slides into duration as it decreases, as harmony
becomes monometric rhythm (the properties of consonance and dissonance result
from the factorial resonance of combined frequencies1). And sound, on its broad
peripheries, creeps out of the brain and into the body, then out of conscious sensation
altogether. Since mechanical recording apparatuses know no such distinctions, human
territorializations of the vibratory continuum on all levels—psycho-physiological,
cultural and musicological—can only be relativized by the acute analysis of sound.
Stratal schema are transcendentally deduced from experience. They map real memory
systems, but these are only guaranteed sovereignty for as long as they are venerated
as the final cause of the intensity which is articulated through them: fetishism
(Pythagoras: ‘Everything is number and harmony’).
The distinction between content and expression is always real, in various
ways, but it cannot be said that the terms preexist their double articulation.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:44)
The reinforcement of material and conceptual stratifications of sound makes
Western music a wasteland of redundancy. Sonic technology locking into the song
249
Robin Mackay
as tragic-orgasmic structure, emotional engineering overlaid by the signifying power
of words; the cultural fixing of molar arrangements of specific instruments
(orchestra to rock band) with a certain predictable range of musical effects.
Harmony and counterpoint limiting the sonic to a grid of resonant points. Harmonic
and monometric form itself as Hellenic beauty, right through to the transcendental
despotism of Kant’s Stimmung, is endemic in Western art. In the Western tonal
musical form, the tension of dissonance is always relieved by a consonant
homecoming; this is implied even in the facetious mischief of the avant-garde.
Formed by these resonant coding systems, the reproduction of Western music
has long been a specialized technique, its performance linked to ritualized spectator
events and expressions of power and its graphism being the preserve of specialized
cognoscenti. Mechanical recording makes these techniques entirely procedural,
and the mode of production and reproduction of sound becomes an increasingly
dispersed network. At the same time as it immanentizes music, speech and other
‘noise’, mechanical sound-recording potentially flattens the divide between musician
and listener, allowing the latter a (perhaps modificatory) hand in the performance.
The digital manipulation of sound accelerates to the point of breakdown the
loop between playing and recording, composing and listening and even between
composer and sound. Summarized and abstracted in the circuits of digital sound
manipulation are the obvious virtues and the incidental features of the entire history
of sound-recording technologies. This latest stage of the abstractive vector of the
sonic assemblage stands in relation to late 1990s capitalism as the phonograph
stood to the industrial era.
The phonographic diagram, given its direct transduction of physical wave to
mechanical impulse or electrical signal, provides a code both precisely reproducible
and potentially editable. There is no need of specialized knowledge to interpret
the phonographic record: where the score represents, phonography simply
transduces and can evidently not be described as a system of writing, but only as a
diagram, despite its inventors’ wishes:
(T)hey intended it as surface for the preservation of representation, in other
words, a protector of the preceding mode of organization. It in fact emerged
as a technology imposing a new social system, completing the deritualization
of music and heralding a new network, a new economy and a new politics—
in music as in other social relations.
(Attali 1985:89)
Sound remains stratified only to the extent that systems of observation and
recording are the preserve of the powerful or wise, and their codes and territories
250
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
appear as the divine presupposition of acoustic phenomena. But if the locking-in
and conceptual reinforcement of such coding systems are inevitable, then also a
very different process necessarily follows from the increasingly radical analysis
and resynthesis of sonic material. The production of a sonic technology implies
the construction of principles on the back of a deterritorialization (the production
of an interruption or break in the assemblage at a certain point and the arbitrary
repetition of redeparture from that point, transforming the conditions of possibility
for sound production) and a decoding (rendering any regime of sound-ordering
relative within a field of chromatically variable parameters) whose efficacy
potentially releases, or releases the potential of, the matter of sound.
[T]rends in the evolution of Western Music begin with Pythagoras and
terminate—open-ended—with the theories and experiments of (electronic
music)…. What are these trends?
They are most clearly understood in information-theoretical terms, namely
as a gradual reduction in the redundancy in works of music or, expressed
differently, as a continuous increase in the complexity of sound and
composition, hence an increase in the amount of auditory information
transmitted during a given interval of time. Redundancy reduction has been
achieved over the last two millennia by a steady abolishment of constraints
on three levels: specificity of waveforms, selection of frequencies, and rules
of synchronism and succession.
(Foerster and Beauchamp 1969:9)
The sciences are incomprehensible apart from their combination with currency
(communication): processes are only modelled in order to abstract and reproduce
them on a more efficient basis, at will, or in bulk quantities. But concurrently,
the street finds its own uses, and always produces strange offspring. In the middle
of the processes of analysis and synthesis, the diagram or abstract machine of the
assemblage at issue is seized upon by uninvited forces. Instead of simply reproducing,
the diagram slowly yields its machinic surplus value.
As soon as the deterritorialization of sonic matter into vinyl abstracts it from
the moment, and makes music into this random-access memory available time
and time again, the sonic matter is susceptible to temporal mutation, warping,
looping. The simple laws of selection and connection of elements within any medium
used to store an abstracted signal produce a machinic surplus value anexactly
proportional to the differential between its immanent logic and that of the ‘original’
medium, or its derangement of temporal normativity (deterritorialization). The
contact between vinyl and hand, the technique of ‘scratching’, is an interface
251
Robin Mackay
between temporal systems: rendering the abstract tactile (abstract matter is not a
figurative or metaphorical term), this unplanned interaction makes audible more
about the technology than even its designers were able or willing to realize.
The memory-system of a phonographic record could easily be (and was intended
as) a simple archive, exerting a minimal derangement easily counterbalanced by
the State-friendly effects of pseudo-propaganda (Edison envisaged us listening to
stirring records of political speeches rather than music). Only in materially realizing
the temporal derangement—the abstraction—which had taken place, by creating
something new out of the record, was the machinic potential of the apparatus
unlocked.
Despite the contemporary omnipresence of such abstract matter, a huge amount
of energy is spent in preventing this from happening—docilizing consumers into
using it simply as archival material, or as negative-feedback entertainment. However
technology decodes human experience, redundant forms are tenaciously reaffirmed.
Even in the age of digital technology, the production of a gigantic surplus value is
suppressed or absorbed by the fetishistic packaging of ever-reproduced classical
and ‘classic’ Western forms and the recording industry’s strangely hypocritical
(if not surprising) promises of authenticity and faithfulness.
While decoding doubtless means understanding and translating a code, it
also means destroying the code as such, assigning it an archaic, folkloric or
residual function.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983:245)
Bourgeois tragic pop culture revels in a retro-reactive fascination for these
archaisms, building them back into the system at the level of ironic simulation,
or as ‘classics’ —further strengthening the reflection-reproduction of a self-satisfied
human interiority under the great weight of its own poignant degeneration. Nomads
are more interested in migrating, investigating where else technological synthesis
can take them, via the abstract, the diagram, the plane of consistency.
* * *
A synthesizer places all of the parameters in continuous variation, gradually
making ‘fundamentally heterogeneous elements end up turning into each
other in some way’. The moment this conjunction occurs there is a common
matter. It is only at this point that one reaches the abstract machine, or the
diagram of the assemblage.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:109)
252
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Likewise the sampler places disparate sonic elements upon a plane of consistency
without destroying their particular traits, the intensities produced in the sonic
assemblage by their singular complex of rhythmic disturbances. Instead it enables
these to be systematically diagrammed, edited, merged, manipulated as virtual
entities, then reactualized. Sound becomes a series of partial objects for engineering,
rather than an object of admiration for heavenly metaphorics. Even unassuming
theorists who provide reconnaissance data for nomadic war upon the strata know
to some extent what they’re doing:
I would hope that we could soon find whatever…excuse we still need to
quit talking about ‘mellow timbres’ and ‘edgy timbres’, and ‘timbres’
altogether, in favor of contextual musical analysis of developing structures
of vibrato, tremolo, spectral transformation, and all those various dimensions
of sound which need no longer languish as inmates of some metaphor.
(Foerster and Beauchamp 1969:128)
The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor—all that consists
is real.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:69)
It is truly the minority whose experimentation has begun to explore the full
potential, the true alien nature of abstract matter. The question will be, what sort
of tactics are most efficacious in the releasing of machinic potential (surplus-value)?
And how is it that, speaking in terms of the sonic assemblage, the vernacular
cybernetics of underground subcultures have already sent such vectors crashing
through the strata?
* * *
Lift the needle, bring it across, smooth, gliding, frictionless, cue it up and
then let it delve into that 12 inch plane of existence.
(Two Fingers and Kirk 1995:37)
Hiphop, house, techno and jungle (‘Hip hop with the last vestiges of ‘natural’ funk
removed+house shorn of all humanist glitz/gospel evangelism+digitized reggae+
…metallic voodoo simulacra+’ (Fisher 1995:5)) as strains of clandestine anti-music.
A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks. These breaks
should in no way be considered as a separation from reality.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983:36)
253
Robin Mackay
Breakbeats—cannibalized rhythmic segments of soul and funk records, looped
and mixed endlessly, becoming dehumanized chunks of sound migrating from their
function as a ‘break’ within the song. DJs invaded by turntable logic, forming
non-organic circuits to produce another time. MCs overlaying breakbeats and
misappropriated soundbites with street neologisms, comic-book mechanismo and
afro-blag, and returning them to vinyl.
Planet Rock, Afrika Bambataa’s rerouting of Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express
through the warzones of the South Bronx, provides the soundtrack to robotics
and breakdance—a neo-industrial voodoo-tech somatics of the grey area between
the white lines of neo-classical German synth-pop and the legacy of the black
heroes of funk and soul.
Hip-hop, together with many other sources, recycled once (many times) more
in dance tracks where, de/reterritorialized as digital signal, sound is redesigned
and reprocessed and once again returned to vinyl for DJs to mix into complex
layers and sequences, melding tracks together. At every stage of this sonic
metallurgy, a complex feedback and slippage between the functions of crowd,
musician and machine, where sounds produce and execute their own evolutive
pressures. New strains emerge faster than you can count.
As LA’s gangsta rap played uncomfortably upon black American youths’ status
as ‘niggaz’ and revitalized the memory of soul and funk pioneers, jungle, from
the inner cities of the UK, recalls racist taunts, immigration policies, inner-city
meltdowns, and the hybridities of dub, rave, jazz, ska and twotone. It synthesizes
distorted patois gun talk, horror video samples, dubterranean sub-bass and
accelerated razor-sharp rhythms digitally cut into precise flurries. The rhythmic
eccentricity, anexact precision, and constant development of jazz lines shot through
with the mechanical pounding of funk and house and the cavernous low-end of
dub. Africa filtered through Diaspora, alienation, urban decay and techno-virtuality,
the supposedly ‘impossible combination of blackness and the future’ (Fisher 1995)
lethally injecting the colonial terror of the living jungle and its ‘natives’ with SF
future-shock.
Sound is no longer experienced as whole, recognizable and familiar structures,
associated with persons or instruments; it doesn’t signify. Sounds could have come
from anywhere, and can potentially go anywhere, mutating as they pass through
multiple vinylurgical singularities (tracks). They engender their own vast,
clandestine plane which is nothing apart from what moves on it but is nonetheless
real, transversal, tilting though heaps of bastardized techno-junk, Cubasing across
bedroom studios…swerving through clubland, into advertising…sinking back into
James Brown and P-funk and Dub and Voodoo…diving through magnetic signal,
vinyl, vibration, intensity…transmitting as cultural virus, pirate radio, illegal
254
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
duplication…opening onto insomniac planes, fashion codes, violence and ecstasy,
social disintegrations.
Composition by experimentation: the keys of the synthesizer keyboard have
only a machinic relation to the sounds they trigger. Unlike the state-numerical
system of the musical scale, the digital sequencer operates nomadically: number
systems with no necessary hierarchical relations but available to be assigned for
maximum functionality, references and designations reassignable and manipulable
on every level, numbers working rather than signifying.
Samplers making time for the future: timestretching, a digital technique
commonly used in jungle which elongates sounds without altering their pitch,
demonstrates how the speed at which levels of acoustic intensity are digitally
recorded (around 44,000 samples/second) means that a certain level of
destratification is automatically accomplished. Since magnitudes (of acoustic
intensity) are all that each sample bit contains, they can be manipulated so as
to operate underneath the stratification of pitch/duration which depends on the
differentiation of the relatively slow comprehensive temporality of cycles per
second. 2 Designed to tune up samples of musical instruments, timestretching
is employed as a means of creating periods of disorientating duration, impossible
speeds and slownesses, realizing the temporal disturbance it is capable of. This
is only to repeat again that acute analysis of strata presupposes sub-stratic sampling
and so is tantamount to their dissolution, and the freeing of machinic potential.
This principle also applies to sampling in the more usual sense, as the
decontextualized use of pieces of recorded sound (and to similar techniques in
other media). Most of the accumulated techniques of today’s sonic engineers
were acquired by chance, or as a response to some mechanical or economic
limitation. That’s the story of hip-hop, the cyberpunk history of a new sonic
assemblage taking shape with neither metanarrative nor progressive urgency.
Unexpected convergences during the bricolage of machine-sequenced sound count
more than planned outcomes. Following the grain of sound, rolling with the
rhythm. Distributed wildstyle jamming, describing polyrhythmic lines of
metamorphosis which take in at irregular intervals sample, sequencer, composer,
party crowd, DJ.
The much-vaunted connection between avant-garde movements such as serialism
and musique concrete and hip-hop techniques needs to take account of the fact that,
far from being an intellectual experiment, hip-hop has always been concerned
with producing the maximum intensity where it matters: bodily sound, made for
dancing, no interpretation necessary.
This reticular phylogenetic webbing of transcodings and deterriorializations
marks out hip-hop and its progeny as the sound of superheated anthropo-technic
255
Robin Mackay
circuitries, where decoded flows begin to leave meaning behind, and escape from
molar commoditization by means of a constant flight underground. Uprooted shapes
and sounds merge and rescript, break up and repermutate in the virtual machinery
of the sampler whilst social fabric warps into localized chaosmosis. A subterranean
diagonal which unconditionally migrates from its habitat: accelerating BPMs (no
time to understand), reprocessed percussion (Neither harmony or noise),
timestretching (violating the chronogenic homeostat of pitch/duration) and subbass (sound becoming uncompromisingly physical) retune the neuro-auditory
apparatus to awesomely intricate and dense abysses of sound, and permeate the
body as an amnesiac addiction. Becoming-sound.
Freight weight bass rolling over me. The Rumblism in full effect. From back
to front a wave of sound, heartbeat-stopping rumblism…. Jungle is me and
I am the Jungle—no distinction, no separation.
(Two Fingers and Kirk 1995:101, 109)
But why was it the bass and percussion breaks that set the ghettos alight, that
demanded a line of flight out of the song? The operation of rhythm within the
African socius involves physicality and communication, rather than signifying sound
shut up in the soul of the music-lover, merely an adjunct to the harmony of the
spheres. African rhythm is a body technology, a precise component, like African
art which is assigned its function by nommo, power of the word (Jahn 1961: ch.
5), and discarded when it has been used, rather than being retained for eternity
in the museum (a scandal which led the ‘art-world’ to have serious doubts about
its value). It is the Western art object which is the ‘fetish’; and it is logocentric Western
world history which cannot understand the transitive voice of the drum.
Voodoo loa are rhythms, or traits immanent in the social machine, which manifest
themselves in response to needs of that machine.3 From where voodoo is, the
Christian God is oppressively monometric and dysfunctional. When the Haitian
authorities tried to force the slaves to convert to Catholicism, the slaves received
a new god into their pantheon, wondering only why the white man lets just one
(dull) loa ride him. For the divine nature of the loa is in their immanence and
availability, not in a miraculous transcendence at once inutile and terrifying which
despotically inscribes its disjunctions onto the social body, allowing no feedback.
Even Bon Dieu is neither feared nor praised. ‘Vodou isn’t like that…. It isn’t
concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting
things done’ (Gibson 1993:111). Voodoo drums call Legba, loa of the pathways,
to remove the barrier (the black mirror) which seals the street of the loa off from
the human world. Intoxicating polyrhythm calls the loa to ride the initiates, to
256
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
possess them, to inhabit them with their trances, their traits, their dances. Sound
experienced as bodily sensation, rather than spiritual recreation (Jahn 1961:122)
shows how African languages express non-visual intensity as tactile.
The bassline. Bass it all. Going back to the beginning of everything…. The
tribal notes, the lost civilization of drum and bass. Bass is the vanishing point
on the horizon where all black music disappears back to.
(Two Fingers and Kirk 1995:100–1)
The climatic impracticability of an extensively developed writing system in early
African history produced an asignifying semiotic which resisted the vertical flight
of interpretability and signifiance. The drum functioned as immanent memory
system and transmitter of cultural history, co-intensive with the intonation and
percussion of African languages (a coupling still present now in hip-hop). The
somewhat repellent modus operandi of the slave trade was to capture tribes, destroy
the drums, and then claim disgustedly that Africa had ‘no history’. Not that the
ROM-museum of Western history could claim any filiation with the vastly
distributed machinery of a communicative social machine whose resilience defies
genocidal colonialism.
The virtual history of the drum gradually rematerializes, irrupting into Western
music like a long-awaited revenge for its brutal silencing. Speaking for centuries
in all outlawed musical forms, those which explored the virtual spaces of sonic
assemblages rather than reciting texts, and currently in cyberflux digi-processed
afro-futurist, it steals sounds and speaks them back in its own becoming-Creole
(nommo is always a becoming-word and a word-becoming which does not signify
but (re-)invents what it is applied to), its own complex of rhythms. The memegrinder. Predator, indiscernible jungle warfare. All State authorities, like the Haitian
plantation-owners, fear the materiality of sound, and the unintelligible, ungodly
rites that surround it (sampled/sequenced music is the first form of music to
have its performance specifically proscribed by an Act of Parliament). Again and
again the drums are confiscated, but the Black Secret Technology continues. Voodoo,
the practice of rhythmic contagion, is the tactile point of contact between the
social body and the deterritorialized socius, proceeding by means of decoded sonic
affect to reinsert the social into the pulsive maelstrom of matter-flows. Dahomian
snake-becomings (plunging desiring-machines into the BwO) transform into
distributed and refined subsocial programs under ascendant pressure from secured
State molarity, travelling unnoticed by icebound damping systems.
* * *
257
Robin Mackay
The Critique of Pure Reason’s ‘profoundly schizoid’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:
19) theory maps reality as intensive magnitude, ‘beginning in pure intuition=0’
(Kant 1933:202 A166/B208), ‘continuous’ and ‘flowing’, the ‘matter’ of
experience (Kant 1933:204 A170/B211). Rational categories supplant the positivity
of intensity with the ultimate and empty form of experience, zero intensity as
negation, as the miraculous hypnostatic attractor of pure intuition. A complete
stasis, an escape from ‘that element which cannot be anticipated’ (Kant 1933:204
A170/B211), which brings us closer to the god of the disjunctive syllogism. The
tautological death of pure form: a favourite trope of philosophy.
Capitalism and Schizophrenia’s zero intensity is not a zero of absence or negation,
but more like the zero of MIDI which designates the establishment of a plane of
communication. The surface of a full body where intensity ebbs and shatters. Or
think of the way morphing drum patterns glide and trip across the surface of
their own momentum.
Disjunctive synthesis as primary is replaced in Capitalism and Schizophrenia by
connective synthesis: ‘…and…’. The rational scaffold of Kantianism, the matter/
form distinction together with the privileging of the latter, dismantled into the
immanence of desiring-production, the machinic unconscious:
[I]t is high time to replace the Kantian question ‘how are synthetic judgements
a priori possible?’ with another question: ‘why is belief in such judgements
necessary?
(Nietzsche 1973:11)
Like Nietzsche’s will to power, like Bataille’s general economics, the machinic
unconscious is a cipher for the dissembling force of critique whose runaway feedback
loop consists of increasingly sophisticated analyses of its own stratification. Capitalism
and Schizophrenia is a program for desirevolutionary autocritique, a toolbox for
migrating (=) intelligence.
Reality production is described as a process of silting, mnemonic residue,
stratification, the freezing, quantizing and subsequent coding and territorialization
of sequences of intensities. So ‘the question is not how things manage to leave
the strata, but how things get there in the first place’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1987:56). Pragmatically the simulation or diagramming of strata is always the
first task of stratoanalysis.
But reality consists also and contemporaneously in the circuit virtual—actual—
virtual. The swoop to zero intensity and back, reinsertion into connective synthesis,
the unfolding and metamorphosis of machinic potential into the experience of
passage through its actualizations. Memory systems provide the spaces between
258
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
which communication takes place, at the risk of their own dissolution.
Schizophrenia-paranoia as the poles of desiring-production, the tensorial polemos
which produces intensive gradients as frictional oscillation (Spinozan passion).
Stratification is simultaneously cruel persecution and aboriginal reality. Repulsion—
Attraction, Paranoia—Miraculation. Transcendental simulation. Reality as black
humour (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:11).
Mobilization: second task. To accelerate virtual-actual circuits; to constantly
bring codes and territories as close as possible to their mutation or dissolution,
prospecting for a new earth, new planes of communication, whose vast possibilities
lie in lurker-space waiting for an escape/invasion. Memory-space is a necessary
but not a sufficient condition for social or desiring-production. Intensive machinery
is always in play, on transversal circuits.
Technology is an index of social sophistication since diagrammatic recording
in the service of replication is precisely this impossible intimacy of stratification
and communication. Digital communications technology is a hysterical stage in
the history of this tension: its products must at once be invisible data-ducts and
carry a trademark. So even ‘late’ capitalism still sees decoding equipment sold
as, and in constant desperation to retain its identity as, sedentary consumer goods
(digital publishing, home audio and video, communications, consumer credit, the
Internet —one of the best examples being the lamentable familial-archival use
made of camcorders).
Privatization coupled with deregulation in general involves a decoding of flows
contrary to the establishment of a molar social machine. Capitalist social
reproduction must domesticate intractable flows, although in the field of technical
machines this function becomes almost automatic, the rate of technological
dissemination necessitating great standardizations to ensure global compatibility.
This techno-miraculative locking acts as a ratchet for intelligence, inscribing
progressively sophisticated and autonomous coding systems upon the social body.
Revolutionary systems which accelerate communication find commerce already
waiting patiently for them, but because they lock into systems of resonance and
redundancy under market pressure, their machinic potential is squeezed into
sedentary structures which resist the drift of a deterritorializing socius. The
embedding of these systems engenders an estrangement between the schizophrenic
movements of the social unconscious and its corporeal reality. Darkside operates
rhizomatically, spontaneously digesting complexification into its maelstrom and
creating new monsters. Progressive ascendancy operates by heaping systems into
functional axiomatics, reconstituting molarity where possible. They approach
convergence in lurches, as disordered desiring-machines catalyse the
molecularization of the social, reciprocally acquiring new influxes of estranged
259
Robin Mackay
desire. The bombed-out schizophrenic is the one who takes this diagonal too far
too soon, before the socius can digest it: Artaud binned by society, obsessively
decoding vocal and/or logographical systems into the ‘gasps and cries’ of
schizonautic BwO burnout, ‘sheer unarticulated blocks of sound’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983:9). The alphabet as an object of exploration, of machinic exploitation,
an apparatus of migration. Consonants are break-cuts in a vowel-flow. Permutation
hunts down potential. Various coding systems, some human, some unknown, emerge
and are submerged in turn:
katarsun
dafrer
urfru
omprend unon
non stop
onmprend
…tscharfukt
(Artaud 1946: vol. 25:193/216)
Not ‘mistaking words for things’, but using words as machine parts. Maximum
slogan density—the delirious opus postumum of a psychotic advertising exec, shortcircuiting the market to testify, alone and already a crowd criss-crossed by nommo,
to the incarceration of machinic potential in ‘natural’ language. Using the frayed
edges of words which connect like a hidden passageway to their milieu of exteriority
to irradiate the whole system.
Playing de/coding apparatuses tactically against their fetishistic tendencies
(solvent abuse) is a thoroughly schizoanalytic procedure—riding the cusp of
cyberpositive commodification without turning into a shopkeeper, or rushing into
black-hole deterritorialization. The perversity and ambivalence of capitalist
production (exemplified by the advertising industry’s enslavement of orphaned
chunks of language-intensity to vapid consumerism) is the key to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, a justification in itself for that untimely coupling of cracked-up heads.
But at its outer limit, the capitalist socius is the machinic unconscious. It clicks
into desiring-production as decoded language clicks into rhythm.
Capitalization agitates for decoded communication, the abstract general
equivalent, whilst performing a gross overcoding which dichotomizes monetary
exchange as capital/cash, one mapping an intensive series, non-linear positive
feedback, the other mapping extensive, linear and unproductive circles: investor/
consumer. Cash is livestock for the capitalists’ table. Keep the animals stupid,
hand them little morsels and reap the profits, consumer spending constructed
260
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
as an endlessly reconstituted lack expressed in molar units (financial
psychoanalysis). Capital as a mysterious flow which is always intensifying,
distributing and travelling.
But the double bind is not to be identified with contradiction, and besides,
contra Marx, ‘no-one has ever died of contradictions’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1983:151). The plication (stratogenesis) of capital and cash is a further manifestation
of the twin tendencies of capitalism: a ceaseless expansion of its inner limits, and
a labyrinthine flight from its outer limit—BwO. The clandestine channel of
communication (cataspace) between investment (non-linear complication) and
bovine consumerism (linear compliance) is the escape valve, the diagonal of the
articulation: its covert presupposition and its greatest fear. The abstract currency/
current which is always imagined as complicit (matter—slave—worker—woman—
machine—money—data). But K-circuits inevitably tend towards positive feedback,
accelerating each other. The circuits (even those of the black markets) are their
own escalation, just as money is its circulation. The technological industries, in
their tireless pursuit of efficiency and reproducibility (analysis), must retain
increasing margins of decoding, cutting edges of deterritorialization, which are
always exploited by vagabond science and guerrilla commerce, speeding reality
circuitry into posthuman micro smear-cultures (catalysis—ARPANET becomes
Internet, 303 becomes Acid Machine, car becomes ramraider, turntable becomes
instrument, spraycan becomes paintbrush). There have always been hackers (because
‘there was ice before computers’ (Gibson 1993: 169)). The capitalist socius has
always been (in) the process of disturbing its own striation, just as critique endlessly
throws itself on its inner limits. And catalytic microcultures which induce BwO
migration (lines of flight) are crucial to the cyberpositive surges which accelerate
the process. Anti-Oedipus’ synthetic process of desiring-production played out in
macro feedback turbulence— ‘[T]he more it breaks down, the more it
schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1983:151).
Code is viable currency only insofar as it exploits its margins of decoding.
Internalism (and the separatism of hierarchized representational schemae) produces
poverty. Trade barriers prevent development, and black marketeers always creep
past the border guards. Decoding is always possible and usually inexorable.
Successively decoded currents sweep through cold circuits, rendering them more
conductive as they circulate. The circulation is the conductivity, the surplus value
of code produced by/as desiring-production which renders territorial consolidation
a volatile subcomponent of the material process. ‘Stages’ of capitalism are nomadic
encampments. All currencies float on the full body of capital, and in their
mobilization, mutate.
261
Robin Mackay
[A] code is inseparable from a process of decoding that is inherent to it….
There is no genetics without ‘genetic drift’…. Every code is affected by a
margin of decoding due to the supplements and surplus values—supplements
in the order of a multiplicity, surplus values in the order of a rhizome.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:53)
Will the margin of decoding and deterritorialization (a closed system’s diagonal
drip-feed) gradually widen until, as in the State’s worst nightmare, in a cataclysmic
spasm, the system is collapsed out of ‘itself’, irradiated by its own conditions of
possibility? The nightmare of decoded flows, BwO? Always on the cusp of its own
extropy, capitalism is a continually intensifying plateau which sweeps all of history
along into its trail. And if it feels like it’s gonna blow…you haven’t seen anything
yet… (of course Apocalyptic SF is one essential genre of ‘late’ capitalism).
(C)apitalism has to deal essentially with its own limit, its own destruction—
as Marx says, insofar as it is capable of self-criticism (at least to a certain
point: the point where the limit appears, in the very movement that
counteracts the tendency).
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983:140)
The ‘limit’ point which trips the fuse-switches of panoptic power, reterritorializing
on all of the BwO’s good work, ancillary State apparatuses trying to arrogate to
themselves a share of the surplus value, or absorbing it just in order to endure.
Crisis after crisis, the critical ambivalence appears in all its insane glory. The risible
panic government of the post-Thatcher/Reagan State. The end of the family, of
the social, interpreted by State priests as motives for consolidation, quiescence
and/or despair. Fascist resurgences. Fetish marketing of consumer products under
threat of pandemic anonymous black-market replication. Copyright clampdowns
on sampling. Revival of the good old-fashioned pseudo-tragic pop-chart song as
the response to decoded sub-scene sonic networks.
The tendency of code to drift and the consequent trade-off between migration
and security, which at every subsequent stage must necessarily become less an
option than an impulsion (hence the plasticity of the axiomatic), means that such
illegitimate policing is a never-ending task requiring huge influxes of energy. Thus
not only does a vast pool of machinic potential lie unexplored or become absorbed
and neutralized, but regulators are constantly being assembled to prevent anything
from escaping, overcoding and reterritorializing in a frenzy of xenophobic activity.
Illegitimate policing, coding to abolish migration, communication, external
functionality, is an old story: Plato and the sophists, Kant and the nomads,
262
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
psychoanalysis and schizophrenia. Confiscation of the drums and ‘fetishes’.
Eliminating all but the most impoverished gestalt transmissions, to create
autonomous systemic reality-machines.
The State works so hard at its laziness, paying for the luxury of stasis with a
general ener vation and self-affir ming sedentariness, revelling in its
disengagement. In philosophy the schism between theory and practice
(arithmetica/logistica), the intellectual’s disdain for commerce and business (which
is obviously reciprocated), developed into a perennial State trope on the basis
of Hellenic slavery. The related love of static and ordered forms extends especially
to the marriage of music and mathematics. The Pythagorean scale, which traps
music in harmonic redundancy, geometry as a spatial overcoding of the social
machine (polis), which freezes mathematics for centuries, deleting the problematic
nature of Babylonian ‘algebra’ (nomos).
Such policing is eschewed by Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which instead assembles
the tools necessary for micro-engineering stratoanalysis. Capitalism and Schizophrenia
is a diagram of the highly schizophrenic assemblage of capitalist reality production,
and hints at techniques for exploiting its suppressed potential, its ironic and critical
movement, the process of its endless finalities and its artificial realities. Queer
Mechanics. ‘The schizoanalyst is a mechanic, and schizoanalysis is solely functional’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983:322). Diagonalization invades/escapes stratification
by producing apparatus which decouples reciprocal and vicious articulation-series.
Finding again the intensities which are split (schiz-), in a process which of course
includes further reterritorializations, further codes. A left-handed cartography
in which, however, it is the further which takes precedence in a sinister divergence
from the straight (State) line made of metric-spatial points.
The diagonal frees itself, breaks or twists. The line no longer forms a contour
and instead passes between things, between points. It belongs to a smooth space.
It draws a plane that has no more dimensions than that which crosses.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:505)
In its insistence on the practicality of stratoanalysis (icebreaking), Capitalism and
Schizophrenia plugs into the vernacular cybernetics of Gibson’s street-voudu,
emphasizing the power of minority microcultures whose pragmatic survivalism
precludes for them the bourgeois marginality of the avant-garde or the heroic
martyrdom of resistance politicos:
[W]rite with slogans….
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:24)
263
Robin Mackay
Theory is already practice at the level of intensity; it is only by a conscientious
disintensification that academia sends itself into the woods. Dislike of memetic
transfer, popularity, becoming-style. Must keep it precious…. Heidegger singing
peasant ballads on the folk-club circuit, the senescent Deleuze and Guattari’s
touching concern for the plight of philosophy in the age of advertising (Deleuze
and Guattari 1995:10–12).
HIT ESCAPE
Clandestine planes consist of technological (recording and reproductive) systems
gradually escaping their instrumental definitions and designator-functionality to
communicate through subterranean channels, between marginal non-agents, those
excluded from the official processes of social recording and reproduction.
CONTROL DISABLED
Clandestine planes escape macro socio-theoretical and philosophical monitoring
apparatuses because they operate transversally, without reference to molar
categories or overcodings. No prescribed forms underlie the unfoldings and
catastrophes of matter in such processes. No under-standing. Swarm. Hivelocity.
WILDSTYLE SOUND
Interference patterns and polymetric disturbances in a strange milieu, weaving,
modulating and transcoding: temporary agglomeration and interplay, the track,
or plateau. Writing-machine as remix, sample-heavy. If such an assemblage uses
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, reactualizing its concepts (replication is not duplication,
‘no genetics without genetic drift’), it is not as an object of veneration. As soon
as the concepts ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘decoding’ leave the page they are already
doing deterritorialization and decoding. Philosophical personae become irrelevant
upon machinic engagement, and any misuse of terminology derives from
schizoanalysis’ nature as vague (vagabond) science: don’t try and get it straight—
bend it out of shape even more. Use the rough edges of the plateaus to slot them
into others, creating new planes of consistency in a process which is not personal
any more than hip-hop and jungle are the inventions of a benevolent music-lover.
ROUTES NOT ROOTS
Don’t expect answers or origins, just lines twisting, converging and crossing
as well as diverging; not arborescent but rhizomaniac. No original but always the
vershon. Wildstyle like the graffiti that accompanied hip-hop—an unseen and
264
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
unplanned alliance cross-fertilizing traits through the medium of the wall or the
subway train, inciting unknown associates further and further into baroque foldings
(aparallel evolution). The glistening surfaces of K-culture, videogames, advertising,
twisted into Escher-space, projecting-probing-splitting and joining in unfathomable
planes of colour until the word disappears beneath its own superfluity…neither
really simple, nor really complex, but desimplified in the course of its production.
Overlaid like a second skin onto the subway trains that criss-cross the subterranea
of NYC, Wildstyle creates a clandestine cataspace, a mutant topology of
unanticipated connections, at the same time eliminating the name in favour of
the tag, the offhand flourish of the magic marker that stands for a multiplicity
and its traits, something that once passed through here, leaving its art behind….
SPIRIT SUPERKOOL KOOLKILLER ACE VIPERE SPIDER EDDIE
WOODIE 110 SHADOW 137
the urban city…is the cut-up space of distinctive signs… [it] is a ‘body
without organs’, as Deleuze says, an intersection of channelled flows.
(Baudrillard 1993:76–7, 79)
The city is becoming-wildstyle, and wildstyle uses capitalism’s decoding equipment
(‘the terrorist power of the media…symbolic destruction’ (Baudrillard 1993:76–
7) against the social and semiological reterritorializations of consumer capitalism.
By tattooing walls, SUPERSEX and SUPERKOOL free them from architecture.
(Baudrillard 1993:82)
TRACKS NOT SONGS
The creation of the track as a singular coincidence of a swarmachine of sampled
material, filter sequences, abstract gradients and resistances—the engineer tracking
an anonymous and collectively constituted sonic phylum, actualizing it in the track
as nomadic anarchitecture. Bass has no face, only a machinic probe-head which
collects and connects, and is called on by means of a cthulic cipher:
PHOTEK HYPE LEMON D TEK 9 A-ZONE FLYTRONIX SYSTEM X
Urban style music. The city is a jungle.
It’s a whole new world under the cover of darkness, hiding from the beast,
tuning up in anticipation of the dance. With flow of sound hanging thick in
265
Robin Mackay
the air, crowding in and out of your lungs, becoming the oxygen you breathe,
you realise that the youts in this for real.
(Two Fingers and Kirk 1995:4)
Clandestine in voodoo nights of microcultural mutation. Zero as machinic
assemblages mash-up and cross-fade. Diagonal as markets lock into guerrilla
commerce, ever-decamping nomad cultures, melting in the heat of the chase.
Current.
Beyond the face lies an…inhumanity…cutting edges of deterritorialization
becoming operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute,
forming strange new becomings, new polyvocalities. Become clandestine,
make rhizome everywhere, for the wonder of a nonhuman life to be created.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:190–1)
If it is inevitable that mnemotechnics should take hold of life in such a comprehensive
fashion, it is only on the condition of a necessary and immanent indiscipline. The
principal component of technological sophistication, analysis, is the progressive
disintegration of corporeal machines into virtuality (catastrophe). Darkside influence
functions as retroactive non-linearity (anastrophe), catalysing virtual components
into new artificialities which reprocess the present through its machinic potential.
Clandestine becomings plug the present into the future, looping virtual-actual into
RAM-mutation, intersecting the black mirror which chronologizes non-linear
temporal plurality. The history of the White Man Face will appear in Count Zero
Vodou as a temporary dissipator for labyrinthine convergences, science fiction more
alien than it ever dreamt it would be. ‘The dark continent we’re heading towards’
(Fisher 1995). The living jungle, where to survive is to activate mutant lines, becomeimperceptible in order to perceive, and follow diagonal paths marked out only by
chromatic gradients of intensity (Schwarzenegger in Predator).
Jungle has nothing to do with a fetishistic ‘primitivism’, but signals a twofold
movement whereby diasporic flows of abstract matter, alien(ated) forces, activate
their potential irrespective of the apparently triumphant system of neutralizing,
metabolic molarity. The micro-striation of the capitalist socius tends toward a
smooth space whose inorganic zones of machinic detritus overwhelm the State
apparatus, short-circuiting modernocratic optimism. Voodoo was already in
cyberspace; it was just waiting for the Technics to arrive. Technologies less visible,
less obvious than those of the West: forcibly virtualized on the Atlantic passage,
ready for reactualization in local conditions, a vernacular cybernetics, a rhythmic
contagion, local and specific, functional and asignifiant.
266
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
The beats rolling over me, faster and more insistent, dark and dangerous,
nebulous, underwater, slowing down time and interpretation.
(Two Fingers and Kirk 1995:190)
Stratoanalytical technique: sampling at substratic speeds and scrambling coding
systems, feeding intensificatory experimentation back into the strata to optimize
darkside convergence. Stratoanalysis is never distinct from its mode of operation:
indeed certain modes of operation ‘accidentally’ invent stratoanalytic lines, or
forgotten techniques suddenly resurface as tools of a new stratoanalytic practice.
Preliminary diagonalyses suggest that such so-called ‘spontaneous phenomena’ may
result from the clandestine operation of photonic timestretching devices, steering junglist
vectors from futurelooped loatronic encampments. Catalytic microcultures stretched
across time, rhythms without sense assembling non-organic lives. As they touch us,
we are immersed in new sonic assemblages where abstract matter becomes tactile.
An into-body experience and a new model for thought that cuts through the gridlines of acoustic, aesthetic, social and economic composition. The synthetic future,
no longer enlightened, with a clear vision of the future and able to shut its eyes against
the ‘internal south’, but coming from the dark spaces in the middle, when least expected.
Disturbance of equilibrium…vibrations through the body; breaks and cuts.
Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the
rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can,
the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new
world that will gradually become visible.
(Attali 1985:11)
* * *
At a certain threshold, the experimental dismemberment of codes no longer just
prevents us from complicitly saying what we didn’t want to say, but arrives at a
mobilization or a complication of flows which ‘we’ were never aware of, lines
which emerge from another zone and meet in wildstyle on the darkside, in the
jungle, in full effect.
It therefore remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various
tasks of stratoanalysis proceed.
Notes
1
This principle explains the Pythagorean discovery that ratios of natural numbers
correspond to musical harmony thus: ‘(T)he ear resolves all complex sounds into
267
Robin Mackay
2
3
pendular oscillations…and regards as harmonious only such excitements of the nerves
as continue without disturbance’, i.e. tones whose frequencies are in factorial ratios
and thus do not disrupt each other’s cycles (Helmholtz 1954:229).
This is also the reason one cannot slow down a CD in the same way as one can a
record. This lack of tactile interaction explains the endurance (indeed resurgence) of
such an apparently obsolete medium as the vinyl disc.
It is irrelevant to ask, as many sociologists and anthropologists do, whether initiates
are really possessed, whether what is involved is mass hysteria, hypnosis, or playacting.
This typical psychoanalytical move ignores the fact that the loa have no ‘reality’ apart
from their immanence in the social machine, and therefore their desiring-manifestation
(or machine-infestation) seeks no authenticating status over and above its active function
within the social machine.
References
Artaud, A. (1946) Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard.
Attali, J. (1985) Noise, trans. B.Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bataille, G. (1992) On Nietzsche, trans. B.Boone, New York: Paragon.
Baudrillard, J. (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. I.H.Grant, London: Sage.
Delany, S.R., Tate, G. and Rose, T. (1993) ‘Black to the Future’, in M.Dery (ed.) Flame
Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, Félix (1983) Anti-Oedipus, trans. R.Hurley, M.Seem and H.R.
Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
— (1987) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B.Massumi, London: Athlone.
— (1995) What is Philosophy?, trans. G.Burchell and H.Tomlinson, London: Verso.
Deleuze, G. and Parnet, Claire (1983) ‘Politics’, in G.Deleuze and F.Guattari, On the
Line, New York: Semiotext[e], 1983.
Eglash, R. (1995) ‘African Influences in Cybernetics’, in C.H.Gray (ed.) The Cyborg
Handbook, New York and London: Routledge.
Fisher, Mark (1995) ‘Black Noise’, *** collapse 2.
Foerster, H. and Beauchamp, J.W. (eds) (1969) Music by Computers, New York: Wiley.
Gibson, W. (1993) Count Zero, London: HarperCollins.
Helmholtz, H.L.F (1954) On the Sensation of Tone, trans. A.J.Ellis, New York: Dover.
Jahn, J. (1961) Muntu: The New African Culture, trans. M.Green, New York: Grove Press.
Kant, I. (1933) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K.Smith, London: Macmillan.
Métraux, A. (1972) Voodoo in Haiti, trans. H.Charteris, New York: Schocken.
Nietzsche, F. (1973) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, London: Penguin.
Two Fingers and Kirk, James T. (1995) Junglist, London: Boxtree.
Select Discography
Dr Octagon Blue Flowers Remixes, Mo’Wax.
Ed Rush Check Me Out, DeeJay Recordings.
Heavy Weight Oh Gosh, Rogue Trooper.
268
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Lemon D Urban Flava Pt. 1, Metalheadz.
Marvellous Cain Gun Talk, Suburban Base.
Raekwon Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, RCA.
Remarc In Da Hood, Suburban Base.
— Menace, Whitehouse.
Various Drum & Bass Selection 1–6, Breakdown.
— Platinum Breakz, London/Metalheadz.
— Routes From The Jungle, Virgin.
— Techsteppin, Emotif.
… Thanks also to Switch, Turbofunk, Zc2 and Cur, who helped mix it.
269