This text was published as a chapter in Ultrablack of Music Vol. 2 (2025) [Zer0 Books]
Ultrablack Aphrodite: how 'music' 'seduced' the 'world'
In memetic, genetic, quantum, urban-Darwinism, certain structures and myths went out over others, in the eternal game played inside the arena of this particular spacetime, an after effect of the electromagnetic crisscross path created when the atom (Adam) [a-tomb] was split by [the hadron], from its better half. Collapsing into this spacetime of this common-reality. It split the brain into two-halves, too: Left, Right; Male, Female. Electric, Magnetic. But information from the future is constantly falling into indeterministic gaps in the present. We see what we always have seen, but we don’t expect to see differently. The observer is biassed—the reason why the conditions of our Universe is the ideal incubator for the breeding of galaxies, stars and planets—thermodynamics, the theory by which we hold our notions of cause and effect, is only statistical in nature, overly concerned with its own equilibrium, but the change is equalised and becomes static, with no appreciation for the dynamic processes that make change what it is. Under the regime of thermodynamics, becoming collapses into being like a piece of light, suddenly shy when observed. The arrow of time defined by thermodynamics must be dissolved. Feedback from the future must guide the development of the present and the past. In time is when we notice change, we notice change when light reaches our eyes. It is time for a change, The creation of a new spacetime, it’s time for a change, the production of a new space time. The beginning of Man lies in sound vibration. It is through sound that we produce new spacetimes. The word is the weapon, to destroy the old world, and the tool to build the new. (Phillips, 2022)
Having been outside of Mille Plateaux’s orbit when the first Ultrablack volume came out, to be so close to the centre of Ultrablack of Music Volume II is quite the unlikely position. The situation of being invited to write for this edition is evocative of a scene from any of the works of Plato. I, like Antisthenes, have been brought to the table of Callius, in order to take part in a dialogue (for the record). Given the implicit indeterminacy of this edition’s subject, as laid out in the first edition, and further still in the collective writings of “NON” since the first edition, the field of Ultrablack is as ultra-wide as it is ultra-specific. I, then, appear here today, at your table, aside Szepanski et al., brought here under the premise that I might have something interesting to say. Yet, as I stand to deliver, I freeze—and think: “wait, how did I even get here?” That said, if the becoming of this edition of Ultrablack of Music can be characterised by a “wait, what’s going on?”, then perhaps everything is in order—just as Mao said: “Everything under heaven is in great chaos: the situation is excellent.”
What I have chosen, then, to bury in this tomb, is a simple work of origami. I will attempt to take the work of Jean Baudrillard, Francois Laruelle, Achim Szepanski, Lucretius, Jacques Derrida and Thomas Nail, and fold them into a thousand plaits of Ultrablack materialism. We will take a walk with these writers, and together with them, we will establish a way of ‘thinking in terms of Ultrablack’, then proceed to think music in Ultrablack terms, as a strategy for discussing both the origins of music and its disappearance. I will also offer to this edition a discussion of the very “museness” (as pertaining to “οι Μουσές”) of “music” (“Μουσική”) that prompted Friedrich Nietzsche to characterise music as “the best approximation of the eternal recurrence” (Schroeder, 2001; 194). A lot of this essay explores a philosophical critique of Production, both in relation to Baudrillard’s concept of ‘Seduction’, and in relation to a general post-Marxist critique of the ‘Productivist’ logic of capitalist modernity. The only way to begin, without conforming to the hegemony of unilinear accumulation and the line of thermodynamics, is with a story:
In the beginning, there was Χάος (Noise), who produced, by means of simulation, Γαία, the Earth (“the Feminine”), who, being of the simulation of Χάος, immediately in turn produced Ουρανός, the Sky/Heavens (“the Masculine”) as a simulation of Χάος; Γαία produces Ουρανός in the image of Χάος. As Rhythm arises out of Noise, Γαία arises out of Χάος, and Ουρανός out of Γαία. With Ουρανός, Γαία produces the elements and the vegetation of Earth, and the earliest life of earth, who all, by the will/nature of Ουρανός, keep disappearing. In order to create the immortal daughter who suffers not the fate of Ουρανός, Γαία devised a ritual. Her revolution would involve creating a daughter by inverting Ουρανός means of production, twisting the logic of how Ουρανός produces. To achieve this, she convinces Χρόνος to use Τηθύς to capture the productive piece of Ουρανός. Χρόνος, with the double-edged sickle blade (that symbolises Τηθύς as ruler of curvature), castrates Ουρανός, and the negated symbol of his masculinised logic of production falls into the ocean, Τηθύς. In the impact of the negated-sign hitting the surface of the ocean, foam is foamed. It was an alchemical process of capturing the Sky with the curvature of the Sea’s waves, to produce the bubble or foam (αφρός). Out of this foam came Αφροδίτη, and as she walked upon the Earth, the Universe (Χάος) rejoiced; the Heavens had materialised on Earth, and now the World could begin; the World had waited for Αφροδίτη to come.
The Earth had overthrown the Heavens in Revolution. Γαία inverted the productivist logic of Ουρανός, emasculated it, using the severed prosthesis in a lesbian ritual, the effect of which was the immanence of Αφροδίτη and the beginning of the World. Χάος may have produced Γαία, the Second, but Γαία did not produce Αφροδίτη, the Third; she seduced her by means of ritual. Γαία is a simulation of Χάος, and in trying to simulate Χάος, Γαία (the simulation) produced Ουρανός (simulacra) as the false-Third by using the image of Χάος, not the motion (the way) of Χάος. Γαία’s ritual, however, involved using the non-linear (circular) logic of Τηθύς’ curvature through Time (Χρόνος) to create a curved blade which with to capture a specific piece of the sky. As the waves collapse inwards, back into the ocean, the circle collapses inwards, into the infinite inward spiral that symbolises Αφροδίτη. All of which Γαία produces with the logic of Ουρανός, dies, because they are images, signs, but what Γαία seduces by means of ritualistic reversion of Ουρανός is Seduction itself, immortal, ruler of Death. If the Secret is that Χάος is the Real, then Γαία is the Simulation, and Αφροδίτη is the Second Real (the Third). It is by this dual-nature that Lucretius decrees Αφροδίτη the God(dess) of Seduction, who rules over the World.
Thinking Ultrablack
In Universe Black in the Foundations of Color (2012: 401), Francois Laruelle writes that The Universe and Man are Black, and The World and Philosopher are “white”. Man is of the Universe, and the Philosopher of the World. Importantly, Black and “white” are not presented here as an oppositional structure that follows the productivist logic of modernity. Universe Black has no reference to the “black” that is othered by “white”; it is a more all-encompassing (universal) Black that does not submit to the “authority of light” (productivist hegemony). “White” is an illusion or distortion of light (the eyes), which is characterised precisely by an attempt to other Black that is never perfected: Black is beyond what “white” can negate. This seems to comply with various well-known conventions in Quantum Theory (see Schröter, 2024), especially regarding such matters as ‘the position of the electron’, where trying to determine the position of the electron reveals a limit of the Image of Thought [model] (Laruelle, 2018: 152–156), as the electron is ultimately Black, and cannot be read in terms of position. We are free to imagine, as we do, the electron as a little ball, or a concentration of charge in a field, moving around, but whatever Image we might use to represent an electron will always miss the mark, just. Black, or ‘Ultrablack’ as a way of separating Black from “black” (Szepanski, 2020: 23), is the framework through which music is discussed within this essay, and the purpose of discussing music in this way is, by and large, an experiment—albeit a schizophrenic one—as if publishing a book about mass illiteracy, because ultimately, if music is Ultrablack, it is untellable: it’s a Secret.
Jean Baudrillard is perhaps a peculiar philosopher to consider when thinking about music. Baudrillard, like Laruelle, wrote of a ‘real’ that ‘appears’ (to the eyes of the Philosopher) two-fold, and is characterised by indeterminacy—a ‘Secret Real’ [‘The Universe’]—on the one hand, and an illusory, simulated ‘Reality’ [‘The World’] on the other. ‘The World’ [white], where we produce Thoughts as Philosophers, is a simulation of ‘The Universe’ [(Ultra)black] that has been seduced by ‘the Symbolic’ or re-codified in relation to ‘the Social’: “The power of signs lies in their appearance and disappearance; that is how they efface the world” (Baudrillard, 1990: 94).
Ultrablack is what is masked, both in the sense of obscured and adorned, by “white” in its simulative production of “black”. Ultrablack seduces white, which then produces “black” as a simulation and counter-face of Ultrablack. Ultrablack is that which cannot be signified or simulated in totality as there are always ‘breaks’ (anomalies, gaps, glitches), and it is these ‘breaks’ which hint toward the secret, momentarily, as if to point out the un-pointable with their eyes. The Universe and Man are Ultrablack because they are of the order of the secretive, indeterminate ‘Real’. The Philosopher and World are “white” because they are of the order of the Simulation (representation). Music, Αφροδίτη, Χάος, Noise and Seduction are Ultrablack; they are blackholes which do not so much demarcate the boundaries of the Secret, but rather act as the gaps between lines that can be read, glancingly, to glimpse, momentarily, the secret. As we know from Derrida (2016: 3), ‘Words’ and ‘language’ are ‘white’—they make up a system of signs, and neither words nor language can themselves represent the Universe, given that it is ‘untellable’. But we have learned throughout history to write in such a way that the Universe can be ‘read between the lines’—or at least the Universe can be glimpsed momentarily, if you stare long enough into the gaps between ‘things’/’signs’.
Baudrillard stands out as a prime example of the ‘Anti-Philosopher’, not so much in the sense of Badiou, but in the sense of being someone whose philosophy primarily seeks to undermine ‘Philosophy’ as we know it, and it is Baudrillard’s attempt to ‘plant bombs in the underlying (oppositional) structures of Philosophy’ (“theoretical terrorism”) that makes his philosophy Ultrablack, as Ultrablackness itself dispels or seduces, thus undermining, the oppositional structure of white/black that drives Philosophy (Galloway, 2014: 135).
Where Laruelle and Baudrillard find agreement is in their shared criticism of Philosophy in the West as being of the order of representation; it is logocentric (Derrida) and productivist (Baudrillard), and always affirming masculinised oppositional structures in favour of the positive (Grace, 2000: 150). For example, Laruelle (2020: 82) writes that “Philosophy is the Capital within Thought: the Capital-Form of our general relations to the World, it is an autonomous, generalised form of socio-economic capital”. In other words, it is a way of thinking in the (white) terms of representation and appearance, as opposed to thinking in terms of Ultrablack. Where Laruelle uses non-philosophy to point out how Philosophy has been conditioned (by capital, and other positivist hegemonies) into something disconnected or abstracted (extracted), in Baudrillard’s terms we could that ‘Philosophy’ is a simulacrum of ‘non-Philosophy’. In the same way, we can say that Laruelle’s ‘black‘ (as the other of ‘white’) is a simulacrum of ‘(Ultra)Black’, in that the purpose of ‘black’ (as the other of ‘white’) has disconnected from the original ‘Black’ that was, at one stage in the process, the original referent. If the purpose of ‘black’ is to other ‘white’ (individuate by means of negation), and not even to represent Black, then the simulation of ‘Black’ that ‘white’ ‘produces’ in its struggle to establish itself in the positive, is rather a simulacrum (a copy disconnected from its original) (Baudrillard, 1983: 81).
Better examples, however, of where Baudrillard and Laruelle think in terms of Ultrablack are often found in relation to ‘positionality’. We can take, for example, Baudrillard’s concept of ‘seduction’, and look at how he chooses not to position seduction and production in an oppositional structure (a binary pair)—in fact, he chooses not to position them at all. In the first instance, or on the surface, seduction merely transforms production, it doesn’t work against it or negate it, as this would be a matter of [op]positionality, and seduction is certainly not the Other of production; it is not othered by production. If production is about making ‘things exist’ by ‘bringing them into vision’, then seduction does indeed ‘make things’ invisible (again) through the process of ‘reversion’ (Grace, 2000: 141–142), which does appear to ‘annul signs’, but as Baudrillard has written, it is the ability of signs to disappear and reappear that affords their operational and ‘definitional’ power to ‘efface the World’ or undermine the symbolic by undermining the logic of productivism, which is characterised by unilinear accumulation. It is not that seduction is a force that enacts upon ‘things’ called signs, ushering them towards death; it is that this process of seduction (that production attempts to other itself from) is an aspect of the ontology/nature of signs, and an expression of “their ‘desire’ to be abolished” (Baudrillard, 1990: 45) as part of a cyclical process of re-instantiation that chases after objective permanence. A sign is not a ‘thing’ but a process initiated through ‘ritual’. Seduction, being Ultrablack, is dual-natured; it is both the seduced and the seduction itself (double genitive)4, but this will become important later.
Therefore, seduction is not a negative force against production; there is rather no production, there is no alternative means of creation that others seduction, which is an aspect of the cyclical, self-devouring nature of signs, which swerve (as pertaining to Lucretius) as strategy for simulating the ‘Real’ (Grace, 2000: 141). Baudrillard considers the logic of capitalist modernity to be ‘productivism’, which is characterised by the logic of ‘unilinear accumulation’ (Baudrillard, 1975: 83) or accrual, and so seduction, as that which transforms production, undermines the productivist logic by revealing unilinear accumulation to be an illusion (Grace, 2008: 142). Production, as white, attempts to other itself from Seduction, as Ultrablack, but cyclically short-circuits and disappears again.
The ocean currents (Τηθύς) ‘produce’ waves on the ‘surface’ of the water, and even if the waves appear to become-visible, they are not ever really produced in a way that complies with the unilinear logic of productivism. The waves are a small, temporary surface phenomenon in the bigger system of ocean currents. Τηθύς is the ruler of these currents, and she was used by Γαία, in the form of the curvature of Χρόνος’ blade, in the Lesbian ritual or revolution (both circular processes) that brought Αφροδίτη, the Goddess of Seduction, to ‘the World’ (Nail, 2018: 26–28). Τηθύς is signified with the circle; she rules the indeterministic curvature of the swerve of matter that ‘forces’ becoming to ‘fold’ into cycles of matter, motion and memory, and the motion of the “dance” that causes atoms to become-invisible (disappear) (Marx, 2006: 130). If atoms (white) are there, they are moving so fast that a clear sense of where (positionality) collapses. If signs are there in the same way, they are also moving rapidly and their apparent endurance has to be understood, as pertaining to Nail (2018: 186), as metastable—a state also characterised by the desperate and endless proliferation of the self-same against the system that it depends upon to exist in opposition to. At all stages, there is this chaotic fluttering, flickering, where even the most stable ‘object’ or ‘sign’ has a degree of desperate fragility (shyness), at least upon close inspection. As we read in Nail’s conclusive chapter, Anti-Venus (2022: 197), there is only primordial chaos; all order is made of chaos5—or, to reference an editor of this edition, at all stages of rhythm there is an equal distribution of noise (Szepanski, 2020: 23).
To exemplify this further, Baudrillard had once written, presumably with some irony, that, if anything, there is no Male sex, as it struggles to assert and maintain an opposition to some all-encompassing ‘Other’, which it calls the feminine (Baudrillard, 1990: 16). To paraphrase Rasheeda Philips from the opening, in trying to other itself in opposition to Becoming, something which cannot hold a position of identity, the other of Becoming ‘collapses’ into Being. This hypothesis ties into the work of Baudrillard, where he has asserted that oppositional binaries are always historically and culturally specific, and always inherently masculine. This inevitably essentialist oppositional structure establishes the masculine sex in the positive, and the feminine in the ‘other’, as the opposite of masculine, and Baudrillard’s attempt to show how, if anything, there is only feminine, is an attempt to undermine the logic of oppositional binaries. Within Baudrillard’s work, there is this ‘secret real’ that sometimes seems to take on the form of a monistic Spinozist deity, at least when it is observed as if it is an electron, and much like Lucretius’ Venus (Αφροδίτη), it is characterised by this overthrowing of (or healing of) the dualistic schism by that which is cast respectively in the negative. Nietzsche (1986: a412) affirms the same when writing that “Heraclitus will always be right” that “being is an empty fiction”.
Ultrablack is a radical way of thinking precisely because of how it “terrorises” the productivist logic of capitalist modernity, and we can rotate into Jacques Derrida’s equally Ultrablack criticism of Western philosophy, which he argues is codified by a symbolic ordering of oppositionally structured binary signs: Present/Absent, Positive/Negative, Male/Female, Eyes/Ears, Speech/Writing, Production/Seduction (Harvey, 1983).
Derrida agrees with Baudrillard’s hypothesis that the symbolic ordering of oppositionally paired signs, which codifies capitalist modernity, follows a productivist logic characterised by unilinear accumulation and visibility, and even goes as far as arguing that the history of the West has been largely defined by an on-going struggle to assert the hegemony of presence (Derrida, 1982: 34; Söderbäck, 2013), or what Baudrillard (1983: 126) calls the ‘hegemony of production’, or what Laruelle (2012: 405) called ‘the authority of light’ (‘the supreme mix’). Gilbert and Pearson (1999: 57) write that, in the case of Derrida, Western philosophy traditionally attempts to totalise (envelopment) and stratify (hierarchy) the means and terms with which all philosophy is thought.
Ultrablackness, therefore, joins part of what Louis Althusser (2006: 163) referred to as the ‘Underground Current of Materialism’, which has flowed throughout history, through Heraclitus, Lucretius, and interestingly, Karl Marx. These philosophers are what Thomas Nail (2022b) calls ‘Philosophers of Movement’, and to some extent, it all comes down to the ‘Swerve of Lucretius’. Marx (2006) wrote in his PhD Thesis, citing Lucretius, that matter moves, not as the result of some vital force, but by itself—motion is matter, matter is motion, matter is both in motion and the motion that it is in. What we might think of as an oppositional pair (matter/motion) is an expression of the Same, and it is a grand illusion that we see matter moving in this two-fold way.
Althusser speaks of this “secretive” current as the resistance against the hegemony of production, as if the work of Marx and Lucretius came as acts of self-defence, dealing huge blows to the different historically specific forms of what Derrida, Baudrillard and Laruelle would regard as the same hegemonic regime of power. Given that the symbolic is a simulation of the real, if the real swerves, then why not the symbolic? Signs must swerve; they demand to be abolished. The World, as the symbolic seat of our existence in The Universe, spins on this Third (Szepanski, 2024: 17) axis—the irreversible reversion or seduction of all the signs that constitute the World we Think as Philosophers.
The radical claim of Ultrablackness, then, is that it always prevents the permanent establishment of presence, by seducing signs into ‘Death’, which continuously haunts the unilinear accumulation of production by falsifying its claim. That which makes us behold Ultrablackness, that which invokes it, or that which calls out to it, jilts us, to borrow the term from Adorno (Watson, 2019: 17); the Ultrablack shakes our existence and reminds us, momentarily, just how much we cannot know:
“When Beethoven’s music suddenly overpowers the attentive listener, the ego realises its own finitude and prepares to surrender its harsh self-interest. The ego wakes up to the fact that it is not the centre of the universe but a historical product of social forces, derivative from the unconscious id, whose potentials have yet to be fulfilled. In such a moment, recipients find themselves by losing themselves in the dawning realisation of truth. (Zuidervaart, 1991: 142)
This is the sense in which music is radically ultrablack. Music, in its heralding of ultrablack, jilts; an experience where signs are intensely seduced or revised. Deleuze & Guattari wrote of music and desubjectification/depersonalisation as being almost a strategy for someone to experience themselves as a body differently (deviation or trip), re-codifying their World, yet the same can be understood with Baudrillard, where one’s understanding of themselves as a series of values and integers, is seduced or transformed—if we inhabit the symbolic, and something leads a sign astray, then the World transforms before our eyes. Seduction, in the Anglo-American world, is lathered in connotations of this process of leading astray. How typical of Man to blame Αφροδίτη for seducing them.
Nail wrote three volumes (2018; 2020; 2022) on Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, an epic poem that begins with an elaborate atheistic (therefore appearing on the surface to be paradoxical) invocation of Venus, as the one true deity. In the opening prose of this essay, I reiterated the myth of the birth of Αφροδίτη based on my interpretation of the work of the authors mentioned until now. The myth frames Αφροδίτη as the Goddess of Seduction (as pertaining to Baudrillard), but also as the first moment of immaculate autogenic conception, where Χάος, through Γαία and Τηθύς, successfully replicates itself, within-itself and out-of-itself. What makes Αφροδίτη so ‘powerful’ (affective), as a sign, is that she signifies the moment where matter made more of itself, out of itself; mitosis, DNA replication. In a way, this contributes to how Αφροδίτη, as ruler of the two-faces of Seduction, is also a signifier of this duality. Lucretius writes that Αφροδίτη is both the object of desire and the desire itself (Nail, 2018: 26): she is both the seduction and the production that is seduced. Αφροδίτη, as the Goddess of seduction, cyclically devours herself, and in doing so, produces the appearance of all things. As the Third instantiation of Χάος, the second (the double) being Γαία (the simulation(s) that are the necessary conditions for the Third), Αφροδίτη returns order to chaos; or to use Baudrillard’s terms, she annuls the order of the representation, and seduces production towards what, in the logic of productivism, looks a lot like death. Αφροδίτη is the otherwise arbitrary point that marks the position-in-time where the simulation curves back in on itself and becomes-real again (symbolic death). In terms of the Secret, the simulation (cyclical), the second (the double) becomes the first (again), but in the order of the representation (unilinear), the second collapses into the Third, which I would like to tie into Baudrillard’s notion of ‘the Third’ as per Szepanski (2024: 17).
In reference to the first edition of Ultrablack, Robert Barry is referenced by Bill B. Wintermute as calling music “a machine of anticipation” (Barry, 2017: 246; Wintermute, 2020: 222), where each note sets up the next and is therefore granted a sense of positionality, not in terms spacetime but in terms of sequence. We can see how the necessity of Χάος to pass through Γαία & Ουρανός, to get to Αφροδίτη, gives away another secret; in order for the real to propagate as sound does, it must periodically, rhythmically, produce simulations whereby the necessary conditions for the coming-of-the-same-real are set ritualistically. It is on this ground that one can see a clear ideological continuity between Rasheeda Phillip’s (2022) demand for “the arrow of time defined by the laws of thermodynamics must be dissolved” and Baudrillard’s concept of Seduction as “Everywhere, in every domain, a single form predominates: reversibility, cyclical reversion and annulment put an end to the linearity of time, language, economic exchange, accumulation and power” (Baudrillard, 2017: 23).
What I have proposed is the inclusion of the term Noise in the mythology, based on a cross-examination of Nail’s order-from-chaos and Szepanski’s rhythm-from-noise, based on Baudrillard’s seductivist (instead of productivist) ‘dual-naturedness‘. Chaotic Noise folds into Ordered Rhythm. Thinking Chaos as Noise changes the story in a way that makes it compatible with Quantum Theory. Noise has many definitions, but the acoustician’s definition would be “a sound characterised by a lack of organisation”, in regard to the distribution of the amplitude of the present frequencies; white noise, pink noise, etc. All frequencies are playing at once, equally and entirely at random. To argue that the fundamental state of the Universe is chaotic noise would be to agree with theories of Quantum Fluctuations, where, instead of vacuum or silence, there is flux and noise.
We might at this point change the myth a little, to say that Noise, in the presence of Rhythm, takes on the secondary-form—the folded form—of silence: the breaks between beats, the intrusive silence that transforms sound into a pulse like an LFO. A continuous sound also depends upon cyclical/sinusoidal propagation, which is marked by the smallest breaks imaginable. Χάος paradoxically delivers order through the breaking-up of patterns of endless proliferation. Αφροδίτη’s tendency towards disruption, then, as she seduces The World, is affirmed here by the logic of seduction—as the true second-coming (the Third) of Χάος, she levels reality with such a Noise that everything stops momentarily, thus simultaneously appearing as silence. The illusion of Noise appearing as Silence in the presence of Rhythm is the same process as Ultrablack appearing as black in the presence of white.
Nail, in discussing Lucretius and Venus, establishes a (non-)metaphysics similar to certain Deleuze & Guattari-inspired conceptualisations of ‘the metaphysics of desire’, as pertaining to flows of desire and desiring-machines. It would be no surprise if Deleuze himself, as a deep admirer of Lucretius, would see the reason why Αφροδίτη, commonly known as the Goddess of Desire, is singled out by Lucretius as the original amongst the simulated. In Nail’s work, there is chaos, everywhere, all the time, and it is in motion constantly. As chaos (in our case, noise) moves chaotically, a dance is set in motion regarding the distributions of probabilities of patterns of movement appearing, or moments where motion appears to repeat itself in a cyclical way. Its appearance is demarcated by the pulse of the glitch caused by the indeterministic curvature of the sinusoidal propagation folding back in on itself and collapsing momentarily. Against a backdrop of chaos-noise, the looping cyclical order of the rhythm is noticeable (it becomes visible/is produced). Nail speaks of this emergence of patterns of chaotic movement as metastasis, as in temporarily stable but ontologically doomed/seduced. Where Nail then goes on to discuss four categories of chaotic movement patterns, Szepanski’s work thinks more rigorously in terms of sound, and names these patterns of movement “Rhythms”, which indicate something that chaos does not, such as a relative positionality and a surface—rhythms contain information (Szepanski, 2020). Rhythm arises from the noise like waves on the ocean, determining the surface. The Dolphins of Apollo coming and going. Rhythms appear to jump out of the secret and become known, knowable, visible, identifiable, for some time. We recognise them when they reappear. In their cycles of appearance and disappearance, we can begin to, not imagine, but feel the non-where that things disappear to. A chance to read between the lines.
Music is older than the Wor(l)d
The temptation is to say that the Universe is musical, if it is so governed by the dance of Rhythm, but this is an incorrect inversion—the Universe is not musical, music is Ultrablack, as pertaining to the Secret. We could mistake the Universe as musical because music is of the order of the secret, and for this reason it can jilt us, or seduce a moment where the subject feels, momentarily, the gaps between. To observe silence is paradoxical, sounding like a Buddhist kōan, where one might contemplate how to see sound. It is here where we must read from Nietzsche, because it is precisely this metaphor, and Nietzsche’s contemplation of this metaphor, that set me off in this direction and inspired my first essays that were eventually picked up by NON.
One of the most important lines from Nietzsche on music comes from Thus Spake Zarathustra, where he writes: “must one batter their ears that they may learn to hear with their eyes?” (Nietzsche, 2003: 10). In the first period of trying to follow this line, I turned to Jacques Derrida, who had written about this in The Ear of the Other (1985), effectively accusing the likes of Kant of “bypassing the ear, the organ of negativity” (Gilbert & Pearson, 1999: 58). It was this thread that led me to reading about Derrida’s ‘metaphysics of presence’ and ‘the symbolic order’ (Söderbäck, 2013), where the hegemony of presence is partially achieved through the diminishing of anything that pertains to the negative. Bypassing the ear is, on the one hand, a metaphor for positivism, in that an obsession with the eyes, as the faculty of imagery (representations), has led us to mistaking what is ‘simulated’ for what is ‘real’ (as has been discussed in the opening of this essay), and on the other hand, a very literal statement in both senses of “not listening” as in arrogance, and as in literally not using the ears.
This topic, for me at least, collapsed into a blackhole of sorts, as the possible threads seemed to spiral outwards uncontrollably. There was the Deleuzoguattarian work of Maria Cichosz (2014), who has written about “the potential of paying-attention” and ‘deep listening’, and has devised wonderful theories about how a certain kind of listening allows the experience of other sensations or experiences that are otherwise cut off from us by the hegemony of presence. For example, Derrida wrote of Logocentrism as a way of thinking that was repressive on certain kinds of thinking, or otherwise not-conductive to ‘being open’ to change/novelty/anomalies/transformation. As another example, Deleuze, in his Letter to a Harsh Critic (1995), described the history of philosophy as “philosophy’s own oedipal complex that played a repressive role in philosophy”. Effectively, Cichosz believed that deep listening practices allowed the mind to shut off the logocentric processes that otherwise mediate our experience of the World.
In a previous dissertation of mine (Herzberg, 2015), I wrote extensively about Ayahuasca Icaros, and there have been many examples of foregrounded music being used as the key to any transformational practices. The reality that was being presented through this research was one where the sound/songs/music of shamanic figures grounded the subject. In some cases, the music would be referred to as a ‘shamanic rope’ for one to climb in and out. One could interpret the use of ritualism and hallucinogens as a kind of mytho-scientific practice of positioning a subject in a better position and state to deeply listen, either to polyrhythmic drumming or acapella chanting or humming. In other cases, like with Ayahuasca, the presence of the shaman’s music is the ultimate reminder for “the tripper” that they are “tripping”; it anchors their existence in the World, a foundation to descend, but also a structure to escape. Fifteen years before Mille Plateaux were raging in Europe, iconic Ethnomusicologists like Marlene Dobkin de Rios and Fred Katz (1975) were writing of music as “a jungle-gym of consciousness”, precisely because of these notions of ‘climbing around’ that were coming from studies of ritualised musical practices worldwide. Sound, especially sound codified as music, is so Ultrablack that it is amongst the only ‘things’ we can utilise to make sense of all the simulations, especially when the simulations are running wild, when simulations “degrade” into simulacra. In other words, Music is so real that it dispels simulations.
This brings us even to Walter Benjamin, as discussed by Manderson in Here and Now (2018), where he interprets Benjamin’s idea of inverting the ‘aestheticised politics’ of fascism into the ‘political aesthetics’ of anti-fascism. This term “jilt” was excavated by Mike Watson (2019) from the letters of Adorno and Benjamin, where they discuss the capacity art has to break through hegemony: “the ego wakes up to the fact that it is not the centre of the universe but a historical product of social forces” (Zuidervaart, 1991: 142). Benjamin’s idea is that jilting can be achieved by art when it adheres to Jetztzeit (the here and now). The famous example given is Guernica when presented at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937, which, due to its precise moment in time in World History, jilted/queered the moment, by revealing the hypocrisy of the entire World’s Fair (Manderson, 2018: 11), projecting the image of a co-operative peace between nations while Bilbao was bombed two-weeks before the World’s Fair (just enough time for Picasso to then paint Guernica in response and unveil it to the shocked world). The space-timing involved in this revolutionary artwork is a lesson for us all, although with the accelerating speeds of capital and information, it is hard to imagine how quickly one must have to react to find this Jetztzeit, given how fast everything is moving. Yet, like Αφροδίτη, music has some infallible capacity to jilt, to stop, to intervene, to turn ‘the positive’ (as in to have power over the appearances of images—the masculine) from its course, to revise unilateral accumulation against the productivist logic of modernity.
Returning to the mantra that “music, it seems, best approximates ‘the eternal return’ with its ceaseless flows of differentiation” (Schroeder, 2001: 194), Schroeder is here interpreting Nietzsche in a way that is reminiscent of the work of Szepanski and Nail, where the Universe is in some fundamental way comprised of the same properties as music, or for lack of a better word, made of the same stuff; of the same order. With Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’, we might think again about this idea of a pulse, a pulse signifying the eternal return of a cycle: a fundamentally noisy Universe, out of which polyrhythms metastasise certainly sounds musical. The sentence doesn’t stop there though, as Schroeder finishes his thought by saying that music “terrorises the rational with its refusal to be reduced to an image”, and this is a significant key with which to decode all of this.
If “Kant” (as a figurative representative of the rationalist tradition) has, as Derrida suggests, “bypassed the ear”, it’s because hearing certain music in a certain moment can change certain people. Not only does music “terrorise” the rational by being impossible to pin down or precisely define, it also terrorises the hegemony of production because it is characterised by what Deleuze calls “the rationalist tradition”, and so it threatens to annul the order of the representation, the simulation, the Symbolic. The whole World could be led off-course by the “seductive power of music”. Rather, I might even argue that music has been an understated shaper of human history because of its entanglement with ‘ritual’. For Baudrillard, in simple terms, ritual is the process of forming signs (Baudrillard, 1990: 41), and it is through ritual, throughout history, that we have built together the symbolic world that we inhabit: “Collective ritual action is the source of those shared, morally authoritative symbolic constructs without which speech would have no force” (Grace, 2000: 143). This is especially interesting given Derrida’s idea that the symbolic order places Speech over Writing, thus determining the way in which Philosophy is practised. Derrida (1982: 156) writes that the voice is realised as the idyllic “being at one with oneself”, which renders the ear as a machine that produces “the pacifying lure of organic indifference” (Gilbert & Pearson, 1999: 56). If the value of the voice is in its ability to collapse a multiplicity into a dual-natured singularity (being at one, and with one), then it is Ultrablack, which itself transforms the categories of white/black into Ultrablack. In Baudrillard’s Challenge, Grace (2000: 143) notes that Speech and Ritual are often regarded as highly interdependent and entangled. Speech, Music and Ritual are how the World is seduced into being. Ritual is the secretive origin of Speech and Music. The World is forged through the Ultrablack Ritualisation of Speech and Music, as a strategy for being at one with oneself and thus becoming-Ultrablack.
We can return to Maria Cichosz and suggest that music was necessary in ritual because it assisted in deep listening or achieving the right position to forge images and symbolic associations together. Building symbols together requires precisely coordinated alignments between subjects, and the process is akin to tuning, dancing and beat-matching. As matters of ritual, Music and Speech are experienced through the ear, the organ of negativity (Mas, 2023: 55), which positions Listening as the way of ritual, the way of forging symbols and social constructs. Music, like Speech, was not discovered or stumbled upon; it is not ore in the ground. It coagulated over time, as a communal activity that developed through the cyclical undulations of production and the seduction of production. It is perhaps an example of a particular kind of technē, a musikē technē, that is unique to Man being Ultrablack. Music and Speech, at different stages in history, were liberated from their respective blocks of marble with some prior thought, through the on-going process of ritual. We are certainly still digging music out; we, as humanity, have been carving this particular statue for thousands of years. It is no wonder music can seem to change so much; it is constantly in a state of “in progress”. Music is as unfinished as the Universe is.
Music is ultrablack because it’s entirely self-referential. It has no original in the real, and there never was an original in the real. To make music is to already have some understanding of what music is, what forms it takes, when and where it is enacted and for what reasons. Music production is the externalisation of this concept of music that has no bearing on anything in the real, except the real itself. Even the more analytical definitions of music from Stanford,8 for example, state that to make music requires that it already exists in the form of musical features like pitch and rhythm, and other aesthetic conventions. Some ethnomusicologists argue that music emerged through things like work-songs, where supposedly people cutting trees or performing tasks together, for fun or for efficiency or because it made an activity mean something, eventually coordinated around the sound that is produced by the task.
Over time, this practice could develop into the necessary musical features and aesthetic conventions that satisfy Kania’s (2007) definition, which states that “music is anything that is organised to be heard as music” (Kania, 2007). This definition is almost comically tautological, given the presence of Baudrillard in this text, although it does make sense when you considering the limitations of words. It is interesting to note that Comedy (θάλεια) is a lesser-known musical art (in terms of the Μουσαϊ), and it must be said, somewhere within the humour of the tautological definition of music, there are some serious signs of an Ultrablack Secret lurking somewhere off-screen—that’s why it’s comedic (a musical, ritual strategy for seduction).
My provocation is that music is older than the World, the World was built out of music, through music. We drummed and hummed and sung ourselves into what we are today; we chanted into existence the perilously symbolic Garden of Eden that we inhabit. More specifically, what were once named the muses are the ritualistic practices that established the symbolic: Hymns & Sacred poetry (Πολυμνία), [epic] Poetry (Καλλιόπη), Astronomy (Ουρανία), Comedy (θάλεια), Tragedy (Μελπομένι), History (Κλείο), Dance and Choral Singing (Τερψιχόρη), Love Poetry and Lyrical Poetry (Ερατώ), and Music (Ευτέρπη). Μουσική puts the μους- in μουσές, not the other way around; it is ultrablack after all.
The nine feminine muses reflect the historical view that the feminine rules over (can create and destroy) appearances and images, representations and signs, which are historically masculine (Sky/Immaterial/Man). Χάος makes Γαία, who makes Ουρανός, and then Γαία seduces Ουρανός (to Death/emasculation) by means of indeterministic curvature over time (Χρόνος uses Τηθύς) to create Αφροδίτη. In Baudrillard’s view, as masculinity tries to separate itself from femininity, it takes the position of colour (the ‘position of position’ as pertaining to Laruelle), yet we know from Baudrillard that this masculinity, which tries to separate itself, is just more of the same of what it tries to negate; it’s all seduction under a thin illusory veil of appearing as production, or, as we know from Nail, all patterns of ordered movement are comprised of chaotic movement, or from Szepanski, that all Rhythm is saturated with Noise. The point here is that the framework of Ultrablack presents the masculine as the image, as the immaterial representation, over which the feminine rules—the feminine can create the masculine and transform it, or bring about its death. Through the ritual practices of the muses, both the World and the Philosopher were erected (in all possible meanings), as ordered rhythm arising from chaotic noise. The masculine represents the signs forged by the feminine, which codify both the World and the Subject.
Music, then, out-dates the World itself, and leaves us in a situation that, despite being built out of the theories of writers like Derrida, Deleuze and Baudrillard, is once again reminiscent of Buddhist kōans: words cannot describe that which words exist within; they cannot signify anything outside of their limits, only the lyrical or poetic use of words can hint towards the Secret. Words are representations like images; they are like musical scores that try to capture, describe or identify a melody. In the language of Nietzsche, the Universe cannot be reduced to an image, and neither can music, so it shakes the very foundations of the rational tradition that is “(phal)logocentric” (Söderbäck, 2013). The attempt to define music in rational terms not only fails but causes it to short-circuit, where the terms themselves momentarily fail. In this sense, the task of defining music is not only difficult, but somehow dangerous, which is precisely what ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl (2010: 89) has written in a now-redacted essay (I Can’t Say a Thing until I’ve Seen the Score), where he frames the history of musicology as a cult matter, whereby the terminology of music has been made intentionally secretive and exclusionary. Music has historically been studied in isolation, by monks at a monastery, for example, or by using a specifically codified language (“Music Theory”) that is largely inaccessible to people without top-down initiation/invitation.
Music has been kept under wraps throughout history: a secretive tradition, held tightly and suspiciously by an overtly masculine (productivist) grasp. If music is ultrablack, it is therefore an anti-sign; a cursed non-sign that negates other signs. In trying to signify music, or to reduce it to an image, one produces something that seems like a sign but does not reinforce the symbolic structure; neither acts against it, but transforms it. To reduce music to a sign—a word, an image—creates a blackhole, an ultrablack hole that deterritorialized signs, luring them away from their hegemonic position; a forced feminisation of statured military generals. Perhaps it was with music that Omphale ensnared Hercules, before making him wear a dress and lounge around the palace like a woman, which, if you read the mythology in a particular way, is the moment where Hercules becomes a God, as it is here that he negates the “Man” aspect in the “Man/God” oppositional structure within his identity. It is in giving up his identity as a Man (both as in Male and as in Human) that Hercules became deified. If God is the first, Man the second, and Woman the third, then God and Woman are one-and-the-same when de-codifying the productivist logic of unilinear accumulation through the secret of curvature. By knowing the Secret that the Universe curves, we cannot be tricked by the illusion of linearity.
As a (non-)sign that dispels signs, it is clear why Western hegemony would fear music, or be terrorised by it, as if it were some Ultrablack heathen magic that threatens to undermine the authority of light. Music—as the externalisation of ritual, as the strategy of symbolic technē (externalisation)—both creates and transforms Worlds. The very image of the West (Christendom, the first world, etc.)—this governing, totalising control-image that has mediated the experience humans have had of the World so repressively—is a symbol that was forged in the very rituals attended by the likes of Aristotle or Socrates. It is just an idea established over millennia of ritualisation, including an endless seductive co-option and recombination of signs and symbols that previously stood. Capital, for example, captures flows of desire: it territorialises, incorporates, and assimilates all of World History to its benefit; like Ultrablackness, it uses the symbolic World to propagate itself. It seems in many moments that Capital could be Ultrablack, but the fine line lies in the production. We can think about this in terms of Carrière’s (2023: 32) method of differentiating Intelligence from Artificial Intelligence, which appears to do the same thing, but one seduces the Universe whilst the other simulates the World. Capital feeds on the World like a parasite, whereas the Αφροδίτη feeds the World like her mother (Γαία). Interestingly, this interpretation of Artificial Intelligence is in proximity with my interpretation of the work of Szepanski (2024: 157) on Artificial Intelligence, where there is a tantalising trace of the idea that Capital is an A.I., or it determines outcomes through a profoundly programmatic, algorithmic control, despite, on the surface, seeming tolerant, reflexive, or hedonistic (Szepanski, 2024: 96). Artificial Intelligence is a system that “moves closer to its demise” as it “approaches such [apparent] perfection”.
A good example of how capital uses the logic of unilinear accumulation to endlessly proliferate itself in an illusory (speculative) way would be American Hegemony itself, with its assimilation of both the symbols of Christianity and Capitalism, as two symbolic regimes of power of signs/values that have great influence over subjects, because the subjectivity of the subject itself is established in reference to these dominant signs. There is no way to easily erase the history and memory of a subject, to dissolve the system of signs that their World is made of, so any regime of power has no choice but to preserve these signs, or take their reigns, as if they are horses already in motion. The illusory progress of Capital moving through World History (Carrière, 2023b) is exactly that: the illusion of the horse-rider making progress when the horses were moving of their own will, perhaps annoyed by the presence of the riders on their backs, but graceful and majestic enough to not interrupt their performance of themselves for the sake of a Man. Memory is not separate to Matter, it is part of its codification, so the illusion of unilinear accumulation over Western history, of keeping what works and building on-top of the old (culture) is really the paradoxical result of the opposite of productivism—it only looks like the West has developed through the logic of accrual precisely because accrual is not possible. There is nothing to add, there is only the possibility to transform, so by virtue of never being able to add, one must always use what is already there. By using what is already there, it appears that the novel is being produced, accrued (unilinear accumulation), stacked on top of itself, and in our World, it really looks like that. We can see the ruins of Rome beneath our feet, we use their roads that have been adapted, elaborated and transformed, we use Roman words that have been twisted, mutated, added, refined, processed. But in the real, it is just reversion of the same; nothing is ever being added, only folded.
This could go on indefinitely, but there is a need to diverge here towards the end, out of respect for death. Discussing music in terms of Ultrablackness has led us to Sun Ra, who famously said that the chaos of this World is due to the music that the musicians are playing, that they are forced to play by those who just think about money. This makes sense when read in relation to what has been said here about Baudrillard and Ultrablackness, because effectively Sun Ra is saying that the Muses, the Musicians (those who practise the art of the Muses—musikē technē), invoke the World through their music, their music rituals, and their musical technē. Currently, the musicians are being forced to play music that is re-codifying the simulation and producing these tensions and problems, producing a World characterised by the false dichotomy of “white”/“black” (instead of Ultrablack), which, while metaphorical or figurative, is also literally and directly related to the black experience (racism). Creating a new World without racism, where Blackness seems to disappear, is an interesting element of Afrofuturism. A “raver” who understands that rave is resisting something would understand that, if we “solved the problems of society”, we wouldn’t need to rave, or in other words, a raver ought to dream of not being a raver. Perhaps rave is a good example of Leninist Political Scaffolding Techniques, as it was a temporary construct of which the very material was taken and repurposed elsewhere.
In some interpretations, the end point of the Afrofuturist movement is the end of Blackness (as something othered to whiteness), in the sense of phasing out/breaking down racist hegemony. When we frame it like this, Baudrillard’s work as a theoretical terrorist takes on a new light, because the structures he tried to ‘bomb’ were the very structures that uphold the current regime of power, which is, through the assimilative and adaptive nature of capital, made up of many control signs. This temptation to other the enemy as “cishetero-patriarchal-white-supremecist-productivist-western-capitalist-modernity” arises because the regime of power controls subjectivity through all of these dimensions, all of these signs, all of these intersections, and this is the essence of Biopower. There is a very intimate recognition from Sun Ra that even the grassroots movements of Blues, Soul, and so on, can be co-opted to serve the hegemony that oppresses black communities, and that being forced to continue playing these forms of music in the way that the white music industry and consumer audience feeds off of, plays a role in the on-going reproduction of the hegemony. Sun Ra understood that the music people were playing and listening to was imbued with white-capitalist ideology.
We are talking now about ‘the music industry’, the industrialisation and commodification of music: an incredibly repressive financialised system that produces music as a strategy for the unilinear accumulation of capital (to use Music as the Commodity in M-C-M‘). The music industry controls the form of the majority of music that we ever hear, the demands of capital shape what music we make, demanding that music is produced in certain ways, at certain lengths, or with certain themes, or design schemes, visual language strategies and target demographics. We effectively allow capital to dictate the form of our music. That’s why rave was radical, because it rejected the conventions of capital at that time, and while it was eventually territorialised and assimilated, for a moment in history, rave disrupted the prevailing hegemony. The music the ravers were playing seduced the World, twisted it, jogged it, made it swerve, or any other metaphor that invokes the image of Grandmaster Flash’s hand filling the grooves of the album-record, the perfect commodity for modernity, with the sweat and dust, the material of the body, as he breaks all social codes by pulling the record backwards, “discovering the loop” in the way Titian “discovered” Brutalism, by turning the World back on itself in a display of groundbreaking Musikē Technē (Carrière, 2023: 42). The World we live in today, in the West, is somehow stained by electronic music, as Capital was forced to swallow rave, ingesting a paradoxically near-lethal dose of acid in the process. Capital has since been spiralling out of control, while going absolutely nowhere, writhing around, screaming hysterically: “I ate God, and now I am God”. Even if rave was assimilated, that acid house symbol of the yellow smiling face has been immortalised in the new Image of the West—a glitch, a give-away, a blackhole that secretly undermines the bigger picture.
In the Pursuit of the Muses
As the last part of this text, I would like to invert the old ethnomusicological tradition known as “the harmless drudge” (Nettl, 2010: 5)—a tradition characterised by every ethnomusicologist attempting to define music before proceeding to present what they have found. I will therefore finish by rushing through the same process, only to get bogged down in the process until all that remains is the starting point of another ethnomusicology essay.
Music, it seems, in its ceaseless flows of self-referential duplicity, best approximates Ultrablackness—the gaps that shape, structure and codify Rhythms. Music, as a word, is an attempt to capture the diverse sociosymbolic or semiosonic practices of humans throughout their history, the very practices that brought the World into being (metastasis). Ethnomusicologists started with the definition of humanly organised sound, but given the way the rational tradition analyses through categorisation, a series of questions arise that interrogated this definition of music. If music is ‘humanly organised sound’, then how do you differentiate it from poetry, or from speech, or from the sound produced by a building site being worked on by builders who are organised? Seemingly at the end of the ethnomusicology movement, Kania & Gracyk (2011) added the clauses of “sound organised to be heard as music”, which could be achieved by pertaining to the notion of ‘musical features’ (such as pitch and rhythm) and ‘aesthetic conventions’. At one moment in history, the West seems to understand that there are arts that can be ritualised to change the World, by forging/seducing signs, and divides these talents into nine categories, naming them the muses. Plato distinctively warns humanity not to be frivolous with the Muses:
And attunement, which has coursings akin to the circuits in our soul, has been given by the Muses to him who makes use of the Muses with his intellect, not for the purpose of irrational pleasure (which is what it’s now thought to be useful for), but as an ally to the circuit of the soul within us once it’s become untuned, for the purpose of bringing the soul into arrangement and concord with herself. (Nail, 2018: 147)
In the first instance, music is not separated from poetry and astronomy, or history; it is one of nine (that are one) ritual strategies or technologies for sign-making and World changing. There are musical muses of Choral Singing, and Sacred Hymns, and Epic Poetry, but there is paradoxically also the muse of Music (Ευτέρπη). The muses are individuated but deliberately entangled/overlapped. The muses together create Worlds. It is hard to say that our “music” of today is the music of Euterpe, although the demands of Kania & Gracyk do ultimately imply that, several thousand years later, we still believe it is important to distinguish between Music and Poetry. The rational decision to separate Music and Poetry is at the heart of what I can call “the disappearance of music”, or the moment where music eclipses itself in a way that can only be understood through the iconography of Αφροδίτη and Thomas Nail’s idea of the double-genitive.
When Kania & Gracyk added those clauses to separate music from poetry, birdsong and building sites, they achieved a self-referential loop. It’s ironic that, in trying to specify music so attentively, the resulting definition of music is so open. These ultra-specific, self-referential clauses of “organised as music by using musical features” create a blackhole in the symbolic. In attempting to exclude everything from music, they end up defining music in a way that includes everything. If musical features are the signs that represent music, they are swerving and seduced from all directions, and they, according to Baudrillard, desire Death. Ethnomusicologists worked hand-in-hand with the Avant-Garde in achieving this, because the Avant-Garde would push the limits of music through experimentation, and the Ethnomusicologists and Sociologists would run behind them trying to capture all the new ground under a new composite definition of music that was inclusive of the Novel and therefore seemingly most accurate approximation. Given music is Ultrablack, it is always ‘producing’ the novel through seduction and reversion, so there is always a need to update our definitions of music to include whatever new mutation it has taken on in those split seconds where we stop obsessively observing it, like eyeballing an electron. Every time we blink, it moves.
In this game between the Avant-Garde and the Anthropologists, we ended up with noise music—an interesting phenomenon given that music had been defined once as the opposite of noise, as music requires being organised as if to be heard as music, and noise was considered unorganised sound, so certainly not organised to be heard as music. As the parameters of what constitutes a musical feature change, the way these features can be organised changes, and it becomes possible to imagine and present a way in which “unorganised sound” is organised as if it were music, so it becomes simultaneously organised and not-organised. “Noise music” is a great mimesis of Rhythm arising from the noise whilst containing infinite or indeterminate fractal distributions of noise at every position. With noise music, the other of music is pulled into music, so music eclipses itself, by being both extremely specific, and limitless in its plasticity. There is no other of music if the other of music is also “musical”. The experiments of the Avant-Garde have shown that the concept of musical features does not offer a way out of the tautological definition of music as sound organised to be heard as music, as any sound could end up being a musical feature, if framed or presented as music, folded into music.
We might imagine an inventor or craftsman who makes a reputation for themselves as a master craftsman for a particular invention or innovation or break. They figure out a new way of doing something they have to do, and they figure it out because they do it enough. They know all the variables; they’ve tried and tested new methods either through artistry, science or philosophy. Spending so much time on the craft allowed them to notice a gap in the logic or workflow that could be resolved or completed with something new. In order to solve their problem, they do something specific in their practice, which results in a specific appearance to others. The others see the arrangement of what the craftsman does, the way the process is laid out, and effectively they see something of how the process is performed. Yet, without understanding why the process appears that way, it is not easy to emulate the results. Without understanding the function, one can only simulate the appearance. One could, for example, observe that a chef puts something in the pan in a certain order, but without being aware that the chef is timing things for various reasons, one can put something in the pan in the same order and achieve a different result. Someone can think they are doing what the original craftsman was doing, because it looks like they are, and achieve very different results or produce a different effect.
Here one really has to accept a short-circuiting of language, more than anything, as effectively what is being said is that there is a difference between doing something and simulating something. If we use a techno music producer as an example, they may use a side-chain on the compressor of a bass-line because there is a way of side-chaining that creates a particularly effective dynamic between the bass-line and the kick drum. That being said, the process of side-chaining the bass to the kick drum is not as simple as switching the side-chain on, or drag and dropping it onto a channel; there is always a tweaking process where one experiments with the settings of the compressor to achieve the desired effect. To side-chain a bass is not simply to click side-chain, but what is the difference to one who is listening with their eyes? You follow the video tutorial perfectly, doing what it looks like they are doing in the video, and everything looks like it makes sense, but then you play your track in the club and it sounds terrible. There is indeed a side-chain on the bass, but the bass is not side-chained in any reference to the original. It is undoubtedly difficult to indicate the precise phenomenon being described, because what is we are trying to point at is that which has no point (position). There is achieving a particular effect using a particular tool, and then there is using a particular tool because someone else did, and it is the ultra-fine line between the two that is the Secret which cannot be indicated easily.
The contention here might be that art has long been understood to involve a certain amount of mimesis. Early theories of art were theories of replication, in terms of trying to recreate either the aesthetics of nature or the feeling of nature or the experience of it. I would argue that there is a difference between learning from another and simulating their practice—if the original craftsman teaches someone the way of understanding the reasons for the practice, it is to be expected that the one who learns the practice does it in the same way, appearing to imitate—but this is the fine line between simulation (reproducing the appearance of something) and emulation (reproducing the result of something, or the way of it), between doing and simulating, between becoming and being.
One might understand this through the earlier works of Émilie Carrière (2023), regarding the fine line between Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence. For Carrière, Intelligence (the Intellect) is not a creative vitality that is based on models, or that produces derivatives. Intelligence is a creative vitality that operates without models; it is ‘purely creative’, not simulative. The argument goes that A.I. Art cannot produce the kind of folds that constitute art’s affective power. Carrière uses the example of Titian (“who folded the world in on itself”), producing a break, a true movement toward novelty. A.I Art cannot be expected to produce these kinds of breaks because they operate based on models (Carrière, 2023: 32).
Now, to make this consistent with my previous works, there is a need to distinguish between certain ideas. First, I have argued in the past that there are “no originals” when it comes to art or ideas, that there is always a sense of collective authorship to everything, and the best new musical idea is still made of someone else’s idea, such as the stylistic preferences of Western Music Theory, or the best new website ideas are still composed in a predetermined coding language. This seems to contradict the idea that the intellect, which produces these new ideas, does not operate based on models. Some of the best ideas seem either modelled on or out of other ideas; either the shape of the pot, or the clay it is made out of, is derived from somewhere else. Yet, I would like to argue—based on how I read Baudrillard, Laruelle, Carrière, and so on—that there is a fine line between these examples. One cannot simulate art precisely because of the lack of models, and the lack of originals—there is not a thing to simulate when doing art. In order to re-instantiate the experience of art, one cannot simulate a ‘thing’; rather, there is but a ritual to re-enact. Again, while to the eyes of the observer, it may look like the craftsman is arranging things in this way, to the craftsman, they are doing something else much more specific, which results in a particular arrangement—one is an act of imitating an appearance, the other is ritualising a process.
We could take my favourite story of Guernica as an example. The argument goes that Guernica was such a powerful moment in art due to its Jetztzeit, its sense of “here and now”. Guernica “queered” the Paris World’s Fair, not by how it appeared on its own pavilion, but by how it made every other pavilion appear (Manderson, 2018). Where all the other pavilions seemed to affirm the ideology of the World’s Fair, Guernica attempted to juxtapose the affirmed ideology against the context of World History in order to show its callousness. Two weeks after Bilbao was bombed in 1937, the year before World War Two, the World’s Fair attempted to present the world as unified, friendly, making art together in a very Utopian way, which was a dreadful lie given the moment in history. Guernica also serves as a perfect example of Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘politicising aesthetics’. There is much to learn from this example, but it is different to ‘learn from’ this example and to ‘simulate’ it. Instead of thinking top-down about the aesthetics of the painting, in order to reproduce the affect associated with the painting, one must think about the specific relationship the piece had to the context it was presented in, on all levels, from Psychological to World Historical. It was not the colours used that contained the magic; it was the way colour was used. It was not the style used, but the way the style was used, and it was not the specific event being referenced, but the way the event was referenced.
The appearance of the process can be simulated to no effect, and it is the lack of effect that indicates the simulation. The experience of the effect is what affirms the ritual, or what confirms that the procedure has been done “correctly”. You know you’ve done it right when it works desirably. Αφροδίτη seduces the Continuation of the World; Capital desires the Death of Man. Capital, in its simulation of the World, produces the end of Man, whereas Αφροδίτη, in her becoming-the-Universe, seduces the beginning of the World.
To bring this back to music, with the preceding paragraphs in mind, we could argue that there is the creative, intelligent, ritualised music, and the derivative, artificial, simulated music, with a fine line between the two depending on whether something that looks the same is ritualised or simulated, a replica based on appearances or based on “ways of doing”. The only way to distinguish between what is simulated and what is ritualised is based on the affect produced. It brings us back to the work of Maria Cichosz, and her idea of “paying attention to affects”, as if to suggest that we no longer know the difference between Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, Creative and Derivative, Seduction and Production, Ritual and Simulation, because we do not pay attention to the affects, only the aesthetics. Producing affects requires adhering to the Jetztzeit of the World (ultrablack), not the image of the World (white).
If it seems that this way of thinking about music has no bearing on the World, it is because of the way of the industry, which is a capitalist abstraction nearly a century in age. The commoditization and industrialisation of music is precisely the process of detaching music from ritual. Yet, despite the size of the apparent industrial machinery that pollutes music, the seductive and ritualistic nature of music is not unknown to us. The dust of memory is here with us now; it is pressed into the gaps in my keyboard as I type.
Any raver can tell you about music as ritual, or any attendee of Church. In essence, we are talking about the museness of music—this sense of music having the function of “musing”; a World-building symbolic affect produced through the musical arts of Epic Poetry (Καλλιόπη), Sacred Hymns (Πολυμνία), Dance & Chorus (Τερψιχόρη), Comedy (Θάλεια), Tragedy (Μελπομένη), Lyrical Poetry (Ερατώ), Μythology and History (Κλείο), astronomy (Ουρανία) and music (Ευτέρπη). Ευτέρπη is the most peculiar of all the muses. Among the musical arts (as pertaining to the muses), there is sacred music, choral music, but also music. The granting of the word “mus-” to Ευτέρπη’s territory either signifies its primacy, as in being the first musical art, or the first way of doing something that was ritualised for its capacity to “muse”, or it signifies that a specific ritualised way of doing something best approximates the whole essential concept of muse, and is therefore crowned with the primary image.
Regardless of why the music of Ευτέρπη was named after the whole category, the affect that is produced remains the same. Music is named music because it is musical (as in pertaining to the muses), whilst at the same time, musical in the Anglo-American world means it pertains to our culturally and historically determined concept of music. The only way to resolve this split is to imagine that the historically determined concept of music is somehow pertaining to the concept of the muses. The three become a cycle: muses–music–musical. We recognise the ability of a practice to build or transform the appearance of the world by ritualising (as opposed to simulating) the Secret that lies under the appearance of the World, and observe various ways of producing this affect. The different strategies of producing this affect are grouped into loose categories, and assigned to a Muse who rules over each strategic category.
On the one hand, we could argue that the category of Ευτέρπη was named music because it most approximates the category by producing an affect that is either most potent or most true to the categorical intention, or we could argue that it was named after the category because it couldn’t be defined any other way, which is perhaps the same thing. In not being able to assign a name to a wealth of musical strategies (as in producing the musing affect), those that do not fit into such concepts as poetry or history are generalised into a ninth category of musing practices that can only be categorised based on their incompatibility with categorisation. Being categorised by their un-categorisability is an indication of the Ultrablackness of music—Music is the word for all the identifiable strategies of musing and the ones which can’t be identified specifically.
Ευτέρπη is there because the West couldn’t leave the Other uncategorised, unaccounted for, untamed, and really we might interpret that the presence of Ευτέρπη gives away the Secret that there could be thousands of Muses; myriad un-categorisable, shifting, swerving strategies that appear different all the time because they take into account the here-and-now religiously. Every inch the Universe swerves, the World serves with it. Nothing ever (be)comes again exactly; it is just (be)coming eternally, cyclically, with every cycle marked by a pulse that doesn’t reveal the Secret but eludes to it.
We return again to Robert Barry’s (2017) idea that music is an anticipation machine. Every note, even if “the same” (pitch and length), is continually reintroduced into an ever-changing context; reiterations of the same appear different each time as they each take on the unique characteristics of their position in the sequence (second is defined by its being-second-ness in relation to an existing first and the potentiality of an elusive but tangible Third). As the Universe cyclically re-instantiates itself as the Ultrablack eternal return, leaving traces in the form of pulses that sometimes become rhythmical, its sameness is reiterated with a uniform differentiality. Each instantiation of the same appears oppositional to the prior because, in trying to be “true” to the ritual, the seduction of the same results in the production of the different. If each instantiation needs to be tailor-made to the here-and-now of space-time, which is swerving, then each instantiation of the same must undoubtedly look different due to this constant process of renegotiation. The intelligence that Carrière (2023) speaks of is that which processes/calculates the swerve of Lucretius, tracking it, in order to time movements in accordance with the swerve. The intellect beat-matches itself to the swerve, or dances with it. If, in order to continuously produce more matter from matter, for Γαία to bring forth Αφροδίτη, the Universe (Χάος) ritualises the process whereby matter was created out of matter, which means the Universe does not simulate the appearance of the process but “actually” processes. If the key ingredient to matter’s immaculate swerving is its ritual adherence to the here-and-now, then as each instantiation is added into the pool, and as the composition and chemistry of the pool changes, what needs to be added in order to be compliant with the ritual also changes. The ritual pot demands something different every time to continue the same. Ευτέρπη signifies that different-but-same-ness that exists within the same, the Black in Ultrablack. Music contains an equally indeterminate but distinct reiteration of itself, within itself (being one with oneself), just as the Universe is also at one with itself (just in a way that is mediated by the simulated object that mirrors the seductive process as the Universe folds our World around us, the biased observer).
Ultimately, it seems that the most cutting-edge definitions of music in 2016 were struggling with the same problem as the philosophers who thought-up the muses: there is this thing called music that we can build Worlds with—which everyone knows exists, but no one has a definition for—that can’t really be described without a tautology because, to us, music seems so self-referential that it takes on a paradoxical form. We can be led to believe that music is this thing that takes on the form of albums and songs and concerts and raves (various strategies), but the ubiquitous presence of myriad un-categorisable re-instantiations of the different-same-within-the-same (the dust of memory) eternally haunts and disrupts (obscuring, clogging, contaminating) the temptation to think music in any particular way; so, we as humanity largely don’t try to. Music will always exist to us as this tantalising, paradoxical, dual-natured lover: there will be the music we can understand and identify and categorise, the eight muses, but there will always be this Other category that can only be categorised by an un-categorisability that lurks behind and around (between the lines) the strategic categories and annuls them, undermining their structures. Music will always be this wonderful thing that we think we know so well, and yet we hear voices coming from somewhere else telling us that, Secretly, we don’t know Music at all. She is of a different order. Yet, while the Man who thinks himself Philosopher in World may not know the Secret that he is the Universe, the Dancer who listens to the Music in the Ritual hears the Truth and understands.
It seems that music does, indeed, best approximate the ceaseless flows of the differentiating same, or the eternal return. If Music and Αφροδίτη share in their Ultrablackness, then there has to be some deeper acceptance within ourselves that we will never define music, or capture it, or fully understand it, or always like the direction its going, and it will always disappear or disconnect from us, periodically, as we get lost as Philosophers in the World. But it is in following where Music leads us that we manage to keep finding our way back to becoming in the Universe as Man, again and again.
Seduction (Αφροδίτη), the ‘false’ daughter of Earth (Γαία), but ‘true’ daughter of the Universe, ‘ritualises’ the World into Being by Singing lyrically, and poetically, of ‘Becoming-Ultrablack’.
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