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far as Alex Williams who argues that the hardcore continuum is a purely theoretical
entity.2 Williams ingeniously claims that the HCC
is real, but only as a theory. In other words, the theory exists and has certain effects – how
it influences other forms of production, how it adds to our own experiences of music. It is
certainly related to a reality external to itself (a set of musics, clubs, people) but its role is
not passive, but active. The act of naming is not a naturalistic or scientific act of description, but a creative act itself, an invention, not a discovery.
Part of the problem with Williams’ “hyperstitional” account of the HCC is the fact
that it has hardly fed back into production at all; its main impact has been upon the
consumption and theorisation of music. I would argue that the name “hardcore continuum” (and the theorisation and discussion of the HCC) is irrelevant to the reality
that the name designates. In that sense, the analogy with Australia-the-landmass holds;
the landmass retains the same features irrespective of the name that it is given. But
there are obvious limits to the Australia analogy – because the reality of the hardcore
continuum is not of the order of a physical fact, but of an abstract entity. The notion
of an abstract-real materiality may cause commonsense to recoil, yet a moment’s reflection makes us realise that, not only that abstract entities are real, but that there is nothing more real than them. Unless we posit abstract entities, what sense can we make of
the credit crunch and the recession we are currently living through? Then there is the
Lacanian big Other, the collective fiction which structures and makes consistent social
reality itself. For me, the hardcore continuum is rather like capital: it cannot be experienced as such, but it has clearly identifiable effects. It is not a theoretical entity, but it
can only be encountered via some kind of theoretical reflection. The same questions of
agency come up when thinking about the continuum as thinking about capital. Part of
what was interesting about the concept of the HCC was that “it” rather than individual artists seemed to be the creative force in generating music. The hardcore continuum was an exuberant effacement of the author in a collective circuit which included
producers, DJs and dancers, but which displayed its own cybernetic intelligence not
reducible to the intentions and objectives of individual human agents. The actions of
producers, DJs and dancers were both constrained and enabled by the vicissitudes of
the continuum; they could not enforce a change in style by fiat. That is why appeals to
biography establish nothing – the fact that individuals were also involved in producing
other kinds of music alongside their HCC-related work tells us only that pseudonyms
designate real differences. The defacialised names that producers and DJs adopt are
not neutral tags for an underlying biological-biographical being; rather they indicate
really different entities with their own traits. Take the example of Goldie: when he
started to believe that it was he the biographical-biological individual – as opposed to
the fictive-real entities “Rufige Kru” or “Metalheadz” – that was responsible for his
productions, they became grossly self-indulgent follies.
Part of the reason that it is important to reflect on the hardcore continuum is
that it was an example of a culture in which, to use archaic and perhaps misleading
terms, “tradition” and the “individual talent” could interact. There was a system in
place tight enough to ensure a kind of evolving consistency, but loose enough to enable
innovation. Here was a culture in which there was “interactivity” and “participation”
but it happened at the right speed – the circuit in place didn’t flatten out into immediate access for everyone. Unlike Web 2.0, the time of the HCC was still a punctual time.
It was still the time of dub plates, clubs and record releases, not the dissolute and dis-
Fisher • e Abstract Reality of the “Hardcore Continuum”
tributed Web 2.0 time of leaked mp3 downloads, play-anytime webcasts and instantaneous comment.
The second objection raises questions which connect with broader debates
about postmodernism and hauntology. This decade’s dance music is held to have
moved beyond critical models established in response to the music of the 1990s, and
the disputes here bring into play a certain generational antagonism, the devotees of
this decade’s dance music arguing that those who continue to talk about the HCC are
out-of-touch nostalgics. But there is something unusual about this generational antagonism. The complaint of the older generation here is not the familiar one that new
music is incomprehensible. On the contrary – the problem is that the music being
produced this decade is all too comprehensible. It arises from a sense of disappointment
that we are still in the same sonic phase space established a decade and a half ago. The
period from the 1960s to the 1990s in popular music was marked by future shock, by
the arrival of new forms which were continually obsolescing pre-existing critical models, and which would have been sonically unimaginable only a few years – or even a
few months – previously. The reason that the hardcore continuum is particularly significant is that, as Simon Reynolds puts it,3 it constitutes nothing less than
modernism’s last stand, or unexpected comeback, long after the ideals of modernism had
been abandoned, eroded, questioned, everywhere else (including in pop music). … Amazingly it was able to evade the blight of postmodernity (irony, referentiality, citational
aesthetics) even as it embraced and explored to the hilt the potential of what would on
the surface seem to be the ultimate postmodern sound-machine, the sampler.
The issue of whether funky house or wonky have the same modernist velocity as jungle,
speed garage and 2-step is far more significant than the – still contentious and interesting – question of whether they can still be classified as belonging to the hardcore continuum. It is not as if either funky or wonky have fully succumbed to the conditions of
nostalgia and pastiche which are elsewhere completely dominant in postmodern culture. And there is no doubt that these scenes produce “good records”. The problem,
though, can be grasped by a little time travel thought experiment. Imagine if it were
possible to slip a wonky or a funky house track into a jungle set in 1993. Likely as not,
there would have been a sense of incongruity, but there wouldn’t be future shock. But
jungle would have provoked a sense of future shock if it were played to ravers in 1990,
never mind if it were played in 1977 (the same difference in time between 1993 and
now). The deceleration implied by this thought experiment produces what I have
called “past shock”. Drawing upon the work of Reza Negarestani and Felix Guattari,
Alex Williams has convincingly theorised wonky as “a kind of process, rather than a
fixed endpoint, a liquidation rather than a fusion, a process which occurs to preexisting genres rather than being a genre itself.” Like the hauntological music of Ghost
Box or Burial, but functioning via decay instead of spectrality, wonky emerges in this
theorisation as an alternative to the postmodern “nostalgia mode” which nevertheless
grants that a certain future-oriented velocity has been arrested.
Shadowing both objections is a hostility to theory itself. Theory is cast in the role of a
curmudgeon, preventing unreflective enjoyment. But no such enjoyment has ever been
possible, and the role of criticism – especially a criticism formed and informed by the
pulp modernism of something like the HCC – is evidently not simply to act as scenester cheerleading for whatever happens to be produced now. Moreover, theory’s role
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is not opposed to that of dancing; in many respects, in fact, theory stands in the same
relation to music as does dance. Its function is to complicate and estrange music, not
to simply “respond” or “assess” it, a particularly important role at this time, when so
much writing about music is either breathless PR or dry consumer guides.
•••••••
Author Biography
Mark Fisher is a writer and theorist based in Suffolk, UK. He is a Visiting Fellow at
the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London and he teaches
Philosophy at the City Literary Institute in London. His book Capitalist Realism will
be published by Zer0 books in November 2009. He has edited The Resistible Demise
Of Michael Jackson, a collection of essays on Jackson by academics and music
journalists, which will also be published by Zer0 in November 2009. His weblog can
be found at http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org.
Notes
1
<http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/02/hardcore-continuum-ortheory-and-its.html> (accessed 20 September 2009).
2
<http://splinteringboneashes.blogspot.com/2009/04/invention-or-discovery-or-whenis-genre.html> (accessed 20 September 2009).
3
<http://energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/05/nuum-and-itsdiscontents-4-party.html> (accessed 20 September 2009).