Badiou and Dubstep

I struggled for a while to think of a point of reference through which to relate Badiou's philosophy. I hope that you will not think I take lightly the topic of dubstep to which I adapt Badiou's theory of the subject and event in music. What I intend to present is precisely an attack on ironic appreciation of art as much as the key terms and rationale behind Badiou's works.



Dubstep is present and past, but never merely passing or passed by.

To approach dubstep we depart directly from subjacent ontological components: world and event, the latter rupturing with the representative logic of the former. The subjective form of the dubstep artist is an ambiguous localization in being. On the one side, the subject is only a set of elements of the world, and therefore an object on the stage where the world presents multiplicities; on another side, the subject orients this dancing world of objects in regard to the effects that it is capable of producing, in a direction whose provenance is an event. The artist subject can therefore be said to be the unique known form of “compromise” thinkable between the phenomenal persistence of the club as a space and its eventual reshuffling.

We will call “body” the worldly dimension of the subject, the music produced, and “trace” that which, on the basis of the event, determines the active orientation of the body. A subject is therefore a formal synthesis between the statics of the body and its dynamics, between its composition and its effectuation.

1. A subject is an indirect and creative relation between an event and a world.

Let’s choose as a “world” dubstep music at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, a movement which breaks the history of dance music in two by affirming the possibility of an undulating world not ruled by the four-on-the-floor pattern.

This is an event as laborious as it radical, which takes nearly a decade to be affirmed and disappear into its subspecies. All this time was necessary for the painful opening of a new music-world.

2. In the context of a becoming-subject, the event (whose entire being is disappearing) is represented by a trace; the world (which doesn’t admit any subject as such) is represented by a body.

Literally, the trace will be what allows itself to be extracted from dubstep’s pieces as an abstract formula of organization of constitutive sounds. Where the 4/4 beat and fundamental rhythm of the bass once was, we have the free choice of a succession of unsettled rhythms, unfixing the order in which notes should appear or be combined. The music is no longer hierarchised by the rhythmic construction and the laws of motion omnipresent in dance clubs, but treated equally, according to a principle of succession chosen by the dubstep artists as the subjacent structure for such or such a work. This organization refers the bass notes only to their internal organization, to their reciprocal relations in a determined acoustic
space.

3. A subject is the general orientation of bodily effects in accordance with the demands of the trace. It is therefore the form-in-trace of bodily effects.

Our subject will be the becoming of dubstep music, that of a music that legislates on musical parameters — and first of all on the licit succession of notes – on the basis of rules without relation to the licit expectations of a crowd or the economic sequences of easy listening. Here it is a question of the history of a new form, incorporated in works, under the name of a subject.

4. The real of a subject resides in the consequences (consequences in a world) of the relation that this subject constitutes between a trace and a body.

The history of dance music is not an anarchic history. It involves a sequence of problems, stumbling on obstacles (“points,” of which more below), extending its base, fighting enemies. This history is coextensive with the existence of a subject (often bizarrely named “contemporary music”). It realizes a system of consequences of the initial given: a trace (new imperative for the musical organization of movement) formally inscribed in a body (effective suite of dubstep works). If it became saturated within a decade, this is not because it failed; it is that every subject, if internally infinite, constitutes a sequence whose temporal limits can be fixed after the fact. Whence the new dubstep artistic subjectivity. Its possibilities are intrinsically infinite. But, towards the end of this decade, its “corporeal” capacities, those that could inscribe themselves in the dimension of the work, are more and more limited. One struggles to really find “interesting” deployments, significant mutations, local completions. Thus an infinite subject comes to its finale.

5. In regard to a given group of consequences conforming to the imperative of the trace, it practically always happens that a part of the body is available or useful, another passive, even harmful. Consequently, every subjectifiable body is erased.

In the development of “contemporary music,” that is, all that which in the culmination of the 20th century merited the name of “music” – if, at least, music is an art and not what an executive believes must be subordinated to a trying entertainment – the organization of rhythm (the rule of succession of notes of the four-on-the-floor) is a rule that easily authorizes a global form. But rhythm is only one of three local characteristics of the note in a given dance music universe. The others, most evidently timbre, pose redoubtable problems to dubstep. One can say that the musical body of dance music is itself riven, at least for certain developments, between the form of dubstep and the auditory sensation. As Lacan said, timbre in fact names in today’s music “what doesn’t stop not writing itself.”

6. There exist two species of consequences, and therefore two modalities of the subject. The first takes the form of adjustments continuous with the interior of the old world, of local appropriations of the new subject to objects and relations of this world. The second treats of closures imposed by the world, of situations where the complexity of identities and differences is brutally referred, for the subject, to the exigency of a choice between two possibilities and two alone. The first modality is an opening: it operates the unbroken opening of a new possibility closest to the possibilities of the old world. The second modality is a point. In the first case, the subject presents itself as an infinite negotiation with the world, whose structures it distends and opens. In the second case, it presents itself as a decision, whose localization is imposed by the impossibility of the open, and the indispensable forcing of the possible.

If you treat a bass line almost as a recognizable segment, you give yourself the possibility that it serve a double function in the architecture of a performance: on the one hand, it ensures, in replacing rhythmic modulations, the global homogeneity in heterogeneity of dubstep; but, on the other hand, its recurrence can be heard as a theme and is thus reknotted with a major principle of rhythmic dance music composition. One will say in this case that the (dubstep) subject opens a negotiation with the old (dance) world. If, on the contrary, you extend the reworking to timbres, so that there is neither development nor return of any element, and, finally, you concentrate the exposition in several derivatives, then it becomes entirely impossible to identify a segment on the old model of dance music. And then the new musical universe forcefully imposes itself by the crossing of an alternative: either an unheard-of musical effect convinces you that the creative event is just what carries the subject to the borders of silence; or it is impossible to grasp the coherencies of a construction, and everything disperses itself as if merely a punctuation without text. The sampling in dubstep is in this way an inspired negotiator of openings to the old world, which is why it is among the most “popular” of the themes in dubstep.

7. A subject is a sequence that comprises continuities and discontinuities, openings and points. The “and” incarnates itself as subject. Or again embodies: A subject is the conjunctive form of a body.

It is enough for us to say that dubstep artists is only a name for musical components of the subject “dubstep music,” in such a way that the genius of openings (the thematic continuities of arrhythmia) and that of points (the temporal discontinuities of sampling) are both incorporated into the same subject. Without at least this, it couldn’t be proven that the dubstep-event was really a caesura in the world of “dance music at the end of the 20th century,” because its consequences could have been too narrow or incapable of treating difficult strategic points with success. The local antinomy, internal to the subject, of dubstep constitutes the essential proof of dubstep just as in the case of the subject that Charles Rosen has named the “classical style,” the names “Mozart” and “Beethoven” prove with a quasi-mathematical rigor that what drew itself inaugurally under the name “Haydn” was an event.

8. The sequential construction of a subject is easier in moments of opening, but the subject is then often a weak subject. This construction is more difficult when it is necessary to cross points; but the subject is then much more secure.

A commonsense remark: if, like dubstep, you subtly negotiate with the inheritance of dance music through sampling from the old world, the construction of the sequential subject “music torn from rhythm” is easier, the public less stubborn, consensus more rapidly obtained. That the subject thus laid down in the openings of the old world is nonetheless fragile can be seen from the fact that dubstep, insensibly, multiplied concessions and, above all, did not open the way to the resolved continuation of this subject, to the unforeseeable multiplication of effects of the dancing musical body newly installed in the world. Dubstep is an immense style, but if one refers to it, it is almost always to justify reactive movements internal to the sequence. If, on the contrary you work on points, and therefore on the discontinuous lines of sampling particular to dubstep, you are faced with considerable difficulties. For a long time you are held to be an esoteric or abstract musician, but it is you who opens the future, you in the name of whom one generalises and solidifies the constructive dimension of the new acoustic world.

9. A new world is subjectively created point by point.

This is a variation on the theme introduced in point 8. The treatment of continuities – of openings – creates, bit by bit, zones of relative indiscernibility between the effects of the subjected body and the “normal” objects of the world. Therefore, finally, zones of indiscernibility between the trace (that orients the body) and the objective or worldly composition of the body; at the end, zones where event and world are superposed in a confused becoming. Only the careful crossing, through non-negotiable decisions, of several strategic points, proves its novelty by destroying what this musical institutionalization takes for an established result.

10. The generic name of a subjective construction is: truth.

In fact only the rhythmic sequence opened by the dubstep-event pronounces the truth of the post-dance club musical world of the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. This truth is unfolded point by point, and cannot be held in any unique formula. But it is possible to say that in every domain (harmony, themes, rhythms, global forms, timbres…) it indicates that the dominant phenomena of the old world effectuate an extensive distortion of the old dancehall style, to finally arrive at what could be called its structural totalization, which is also like an emotive saturation, an anxious seeking, finally hopeless, after effect. It turns out that dance music — the truth of the old style arrived at the saturation of its effects — is the systematic exploration in the dance universe of what has the value of counter-effect. It is due to the genius of this deception that one supposes that dubstep is so often held to be inaudible (unlistenable). And certainly, it would not be any use to hear once again what the old world had declared appropriate for the ears of the human animal. The truth of a world is not a simple object of this world, since it supplements the world with a subject where the power of a body and the destiny of a trace cross. How to make the truth of the audible heard without passing by the in-audible? It is like wanting the truth to be “human,” when it is through its in-humanity that its existence is assured.

The essential point to grasp is that there is no contemporary information about the old style and its becoming-romantic, no eternal and thus current truth, of the musical subject initiated by some New Wave-event that does not pass by an incorporation to the rhythmic sequence, and therefore to the subject usually named “contemporary dance music.” Those numerous types who declare that they like only the old style (or the corporate, it’s the same subject), and that dubstep repels, can certainly know what they love, but remain ignorant of its truth. Is this truth arid? It is a question of use and continuation. It is with the body of the new music that it is necessary, patiently, to associate its own listening. Pleasure will come, beneath the market. It is enough to desire to incorporate ourselves to the subject of an arbitrary truth, that it be eternal, and thus, by the discipline participation imposes, the human animal sees itself accorded the chance — of which it hardly matters if it is arid — of a becoming Immortal.

11. Four affects signal the incorporation of a human animal to the subjective process of a truth. The first is evidence of the desire for a Great Point, of a decisive discontinuity, that will install the new world with a single blow, and complete the subject. We will name it terror. The second is evidence of the fear of points, of a retreat before the obscurity of all that is discontinuous, of all that imposes a choice without guarantee between two hypotheses. Or, again, this affect signals the desire for a continuity, for a monotonous shelter. We will name it anxiety. The third affirms the acceptance of the plurality of points, that the discontinuities are at once imperious and multiform. We will name it courage. The fourth affirms the desire that the subject be a constant intrication of points and openings. It affirms the equivalence, in regard to the pre-eminence of the becoming-subject, of what is continuous and negotiated, and of what is discontinuous and violent. Subjective modalities are there alone, which depend on the construction of the subject in a world and the capacities of the body to produce effects. They are not to be hierarchized. War can have as much value as peace, negotiation as much as struggle, violence as much as gentleness. This affect by which the categories of the act are subordinated to the contingency of worlds, we will name justice.

The anxiety of those who, all the while admitting the necessity of a new subjective division, and saluting the power to come of dubstep, didn’t want to rupture with the prior universe and took for granted the existence of a single corporate music-world, deciphers itself as much behind the sympathetic blustering of tardy enthusiasts as in the negotiated constructions of the most inventive of those who remained in New Wave’s wake. Whence one sees that by “anxiety” we understand here a creative affect, inasmuch as this creation remains normed by the opening rather than by the abruptness of points.

The courage of a dubstep artist is in looking for the points that the new music-world must prove, by deciding the issue in every direction of this world. To do this, he centrally dedicates such or such piece to such or such a point, from which one easily sees that he operates a pure choice in regard to rhythms, to timbres, to the construction of the set, etc. The elliptical side of dubstep derives from the fact that a work does not have to extend itself beyond showing what it decides, from the point at which it has arrived.

12. The ethics of the subject, of which “ethics of truths” is the other name, comes back to this when it is a question of the incorporation of a human animal: to find point by point an order of affects that authorizes the continuation of the process.

Today, the dance music-world is defined negatively. The musical subject and its dancing avatars are entirely saturated, and it is not the plural “musics” – folklore, classicism, light music, exoticism, jazz and baroque reaction in the same festive bag – that will resuscitate them through mashups. However, the dubstep subject has been equally enervated for at least the past three years. Today’s musician, freed from the solitude of the interval in which the old coherent world of rhythm as well as the hard world that produced the truth of the first dubstep works are dispersed in unorganised bodies and empty ceremonies, can only heroically repeat, in his very works: “I go on, in order to think and carry to their paradoxical brilliance the reasons that I have for not going on.”