________________________________________________________________________________ Past Imperfect in the Electronic Archive by Howard Slater "The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history" (1) 1. When music is recurring and a living culture is interlinear the seeking after origins becomes the seeking after closure: an end point that glorifies in specialisation, rarity and the explicatory ruse of desociated genius. The more we seek after origins the more social creativity becomes obscured and the more the movements of a living culture are negated by the canon. Thus it becomes apparent that the discovery of an 'original' or a striving to be 'original' is part of the process of secondary production: a device of softened mediation and canonical filtration that, acts to exclude participation by embossing a model of the exemplary individual upon the social fabric from whence that individual came. That the social shapes the individual, that culture is a social expression intimately linked to history becomes lost when the perpetuation of the myth of 'originality' is at stake. Nothing comes first, but often obscure and submerged precursors who have eluded the closure of the canon are knowingly passed over in a discreditable hubbub that is too sure of its own individualised intent in recycling and repackaging the discoveries of such forgotten practitioners. In this case the silence of originality knows of nothing 'other' to credit than its own individual role: originality becomes the work of repression and suppression. A repression and suppression of others that thus has the effect of deprecating the collectively developed sensibilities of history. Being the 'first' or the 'only' becomes the mark of originality and the individual, in seeking the canonical satisfaction of itself, its uniqueness, pursues this linear course with a dependence that is mistaken for independence. Ambition for such success that the canon can confer implies that what was once part of living culture, and progressing in pact with social creativity, and in full awareness of 'the historical development of the senses', comes to fall in line with those markers that the canon lays down. Rather than proceeding from the experience of practice it proceeds from the premises and provisos of its knowledge of the canon. It knows where the doors are and it comes with letters of introduction, with diplomas and cosmopolitan decorums. Yet whilst a disavowed knowledge of precursors and peers has been used to subvert the history of the canon it is nonetheless a surefire way to ensure ascension into the canon of dead and dealt culture because the canon, as the expressive medium of a secondary production, functions by a process of selection and sifting and seeks what it knows as 'original' and therefore only selects that which gives it the room to exercise and display a measuring and linearised knowledge: a knowledge of common currency. Originality is the same but a same that is instantly recognisable as original. And so, working for the canon, however unconsciously - for the canon is the 'artistic' expression of hegemonic capitalist social relations - becomes work for the recuperation of an historically aware living culture that thrives as an unarbited communistic circulation. 2. That living culture thrives means that its insistence on practice and on an exploration of sound material can proceed without knowledge of precursors. Such an impulsive pursual of discovery often results in some pathways becoming well trod and leading to a use of the same forms and, at times, the same contents. In this case history functions as a form of unconsciousness - an agency in abeyance, an undiscovered registration - rather than as an overly conscious site of plunder. And so, is it not that such discoveries recurr because they have not merited acceptance from the arbiters of the canon? Are they still discoverable, still part of a living culture, a communistic circulation, a counter current that the canon disavows and cannot register without the risk of allowing in the hordes and thereby inciting its own dissolution? Is it, conversely, that they are repeatable because they are forms that are known, but are not well-enough known to become cliches? Is it that their repetition is not the return of an undifferentiated and individualised past but a nuanced and singularisable return that brings historical forms into the present with the accompaniment of many ghostly precursors? Is the repeated use of, say, vari-speed turntables and environment recordings, not , then, simply an indicator as to the character of a living culture? A culture that is open, undetermined and able to "reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities" (2). A culture that is intent on expanding the notion of 'music' so as to "expand a field of possibilities". Thus the living culture is a practice that doesn't privilege perception as being the expression of an "egological framework" (3) but as an interactive and properly socio-historic perception that is entered into. A practice that is thereby strongly linked to its own receptive practice and is thereby part, not only of the living culture of the present, but is linked-into a relation with a past that is a variegated continuity. And so the later discovery of the submerged practitioner can be experienced as a confirmation of practice and as a spur to further discoveries that may very well reveal this prior practitioner as linked to yet another practitioner. Research and destroy. Such an exploration of history, one that cathects its 'object' imaginatively and elaborates from it a 'first time ever' quality, means that the listener-practitioners of the living culture are less susceptible to the mystification of history as 'eras' and negotiable demarcations of time that equate history with tradition and draw lines of separation similar to that which the canon needs to draw between the individual and society. As with the myth of 'originality' such a mechanism, necessary for the canon to carry out its work of building platforms and launch pads in order to refine and modernise itself, is a means by which passion can be replaced by a business-like accounting. The maximal differentiation of the living culture, the passion to perceive and to perceive differently, becomes the heavily financed acceptability of normalised originals through which perception is democratised by decree. 3. Fed by the living culture the archive expands. It becomes the neutral pool of social creativity, a site of dispersion where collection has taken place without accumulation, arrangement or annotation. It is the common storehouse. Being an historical unconscious it is a representational flux that ensnares us in a timeless chain of thought and threads us through with another's desire. It makes clear and confuses again, it confirms a suspicion and provides a confirmation of our ever expanding ignorance. And so it waits silently for us to enter it. But its doors are not marked in the manner of an institution and its walls are not stacked with items of rarity and once we have entered we realise that it is the place that has always been there accompanying our search. We have been here before and yet have always never left because the archive is the place where it has been ever possible for us to discover and interlink those points that preexisted us; points that may never have been linked in the way that we chose to connect them. Thus the archive provides us with a mirror in which we see our own 'originality' as consisting of the idiosyncrasy of our computation, the passionate drive that, with desire as its method, reflects our choices as choices informed by the historic networks of social-creativity to which we have no need to return for they are networks that are our fibrous parallel. Our 'originality' is only in the fact that, in clearing the unconscious we leave more room for other fluxional deposits to accrue and in naming the nameless, in journeying alongside those who are unfamiliar to us, we become ever retrievable from the capitalist social relations that would seek to sever the ties of our multilocationary connectedness and consign us to a history of traditionalised identification. And so it is that the archive amounts to more than any one individual and by thus surpassing the limits of knowledge, by offering an unlimited knowledge as presence, the archive defames knowledge by taunting us with the probability of our error and by embarrassing us with the decisiveness of our prior assertions. Thus the archive mocks any claim to originality and is thus safe from the trespass of those emissaries of the canon who would not dare to face such a decentering of their individuality, such a collapse of their certitude, such an autocritique of their canonical role. But the archive does not confront us with a choice between plagiarism and expressionlessness, it does not humiliate us, but gives us an opportunity to make a living culture even more live: it "does not establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions. It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference far from being the forgotten and recovered origin, is the dispersion that we are and make" (4). It is such a dispersion that widens the field of possibilities to the extent that as individuals we are social and as cultural practitioners we contribute to the communistic circulation of culture. If the question of origins can be forgotten it is not that the issue of origins is repressed. The issue of origins becomes the canonical debasement of difference as distinction. A decoy. Origins and originals can be separated out from the social and can reduce the social to a collection of individuals reducible to the biological status of a gene that knows neither solidarity nor can be conscious of its being mediated by capitalist social-relations. Thus the canon is the cultural expression of capitalistic atavism; the hegemony of lineage and descent that does not allow for the self-creation of the living culture ("the dispersion that we are and make") but offers instead the fixed points and superlative lines of originary distinction. But we create ourselves over in the mutual inherence of a socio-historical that we call the archive, an archive that disperses and capacitates us. For the archive contains the sense that eras can overlap, that the past can carry its own timbres, that individuals can overlap. It is a counter-canon of glorious failures and overambitious attempts where perception and desire co-mingle. And so the collective enterprise is hidden in the archive and it is here that the rejected and the forgotten, the censored and the self-effacing are assembled. And far from being quiet they speak to us and are quick to speak of disavowed plagiarism and of the parasitism that has fed 'originality', of the way that their works were generated in collaborations and were formed by a content that was the avowal and celebration of communistic cultural circulation.The archive is thus the site that reveals the underbelly of the canon's modus operandi. It is from here that rumours of exploitation reach us and we hear once again about the breaching of solidarity: the living culture recuperated into an expression of individualism reliant upon repression. Culture is industrial. Howard Slater Break/Flow Draft: July 1999 89 Vernon Road Stratford London E15 4DQ: UK Notes (i) In this piece I have drawn upon Asger Jorn's notion of a 'living culture' and have used this term rather than 'post-media' as a description of oppositional culture in an effort to reflect the 'transhistorical' inflection of this piece. (ii) Though the piece arose from research into electronic music and the current activity of labels like Bvhaast and Algha Marghen, who are issuing historic material that to some degree upsets the parameters of the canon, it is hoped that its discussion of culture is transversal enough to resonate more widely than canonical categorisation and ghettoistic suspicion allows for. Citations (1) Karl Marx: Early Writing, p353 [Pelican,1984] (2) Umberto Eco: The Open Work, p3 [Harvard University Press,1989] (3) Cornelius Castoriadis: World In Fragments, p297 [Stanford University Press,1997] (4) Michel Foucault: Archaeology Of Knowledge, p131 [Routledge,1995] # distributed via nettime-l: no commercial use without permission of author # is a moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # un/subscribe: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and # "un/subscribe nettime-l you@address" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org/ contact: ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 1999 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org