A contemporary context for the connection of pain and entertainment has been established by Steve Goodman1: pop music and warfare, pop music and torture. In this essay, however, I do not focus primarily on torture through music as a new form of militarisation but on aesthetic questions, questions, that is, that do not even arise until threats to one’s bodily integrity, much less the carrying out of such threats, are not only far away but one finds oneself, as it were, at the opposite extreme of social relations – what we might call freedom. Nevertheless, at issue are two elements which are generally associated with torture and submission: passivity and extraordinary, often extreme sensory events and effects that are not initially provided with specific meanings, indeed the manner of whose presentation impedes, deflects and makes impossible the comprehension of meanings. In almost all aesthetic theories, the asemantic effect and the passivisation or assumed passivity of the audience have had a bad reputation. Here to some extent I would like to defend them both. And I do so against the backdrop of the development of the mass arts and industrial mass culture in the 20th Century, above all film and pop music.
When the subject turns to torture through music (through pop music), the formula of the phenomena that have recently attracted attention, from Guantanamo to Korea, is generally “pain through entertainment”. Entertainment as distraction or diversion, which can be experienced as agonising even under normal conditions because it does not allow us to come to rest and prevents the body from finding its own beat, becomes a total pulverisation of the personality under the conditions of actual torture. The roar of the good mood, the terror of fun – these figures of cultural criticism are only too familiar. But of course, we all know that the worst ordeal is always the familiar; often a familiar phrasing, for example the first two lines of the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest winner “Satellite” is enough to drive one insane. Contemporary culture is a culture of forced participation and encouragement to join in. In the areas of consumption, labour psychology, and advertising, it operates less with normality, submission, and discipline than it did, say, during the Cold War era and the era of Fordist capitalism. It no longer has to sedate and pacify potentially rebellious physically labouring subjects, but instead has to wake up depleted, overburdened, and mentally exhausted employees and keep them going. In this situation, it makes sense that torture would adapt to reflect contemporary culture, for it too now relies less on the disciplinary breaking of the person than on overtaxing and pulverising him or her with an excess of distraction. However, unlike the spectacle in Fordism and event culture in Post-Fordism, its aim is of course not the treatment of the person with the goal of reintegrating him or her into the system of social production but remains his or her destruction. Nonetheless, there has clearly been an analogous paradigm shift in this opposite treatment as well, which seeks to produce an intolerable state and a condition of will-lessness. Rather than a physically violent breaking as the horizon of the threat, a culturally enervating overtaxing seems to be the end that dictates the means.
And yet there was a countermovement in the 20th Century which inverted the logic of this new practice of torture much longer than that practice actually existed. Instead of pain through entertainment, its goal was entertainment through pain. I borrow this formula from the subtitle of a Greatest Hits compilation by the band Throbbing Gristle that was released in 1980 (Entertainment Through Pain). Until then, Throbbing Gristle had not been regarded as a band that would ever describe its work in categories of the entertainment industry. Its first two albums, Second Annual Report and D.o.A.: The Third and Final Report, dealt with issues of control, submission, extreme pain, and even torture in a manner that was fascinating and definitely broke the taboos of the time but that no one would ever have thought to describe as “entertainment”. In the late 1970s, when the first punks were working with early forms of piercing, when forms of self-harm were becoming thematic, and when ritual embraces in youth clubs were increasingly being replaced by equally ritual beatings, TG went the mood one better. In their famous track “Hamburger Lady”, for example, the devastated letter of a nurse whose patients include a woman burned over ninety percent of her body, whom the nurses call “Hamburger Lady”, is read aloud in a soft voice to the accompaniment of swelling synthesiser sounds that resemble industrial saws or drills. Other pieces utilise documents – some of them forensic – referring to paedophilic and other sexual violence, a documentary film showing surgery being performed on male genitalia, or cynical allusions to the Shoah, but never with any clear effort to provoke any ideologically specific moral outrage; the band’s attitude toward what it documents remains unclear.
It seems however – and this is supported by a series of interviews with a few of the band members conducted by the musician Drew Daniel more than two decades later2 – that even stringing harrowing documents together and performing them at earsplitting decibel levels in military costumes was still not ambiguous enough for the band. Cosey Fanni Tutti complains the punks around her at the time were so clueless they wore swastikas to antiracist demonstrations, and she finds it appalling that because of the content of their music and their aesthetic of the extreme, TG was seen as a nihilistic, pre-Gothic band that spent its time amusing itself with black orgies at the expense of the state of the world, that world of which it asked on the cover of another of its albums, with a gesture of parodic sentimentality, if it could really “be as sad as it seems”3.
While TG abstained from moral commentary and also shunned the fasco-Futurist celebration of pure shock, of the searing energy of the total effect, both interpretive possibilities surfaced repeatedly, and not just in the reactions of the audience. The whole genre of Industrial Music, which TG helped to found, frequently alluded to one or the other, or both, of these two poles. Here at least, the incomprehension rooted in the logic of production and so often expressed by musicians and artistic producers for the audience’s inability to remain neutral, its habit of constantly exhibiting reactions, of letting itself be provoked or even traumatised led to an effective countermeasure. The tactic TG sought to employ against the traumatised, the fascists, and the moralists was a lounge aesthetic avant la lettre. This is why Cosey Fanni Tutti appears on the cover of Greatest Hits: Entertainment Through Pain heavily made up as a campy version of a tropical hippie with feather earrings in a touristy bamboo hut with Tiki appeal; the album is dedicated to the Hawaiian tropical ambient artist Martin Denny, who was especially admired by nihilist hipsters and went on in the next twenty years to become a central reference point for the musical lounge aesthetic of the decades of irony (from the late 1980s to 2001). At that time, one could still be fairly sure that by moving into lounge one would not immediately slip on the banana peel of irony; the material TG had to offer was still too demanding, thematically as well as in terms of sensory impact.
To summarise: this gesture, with which TG sought to counteract a narrowing of its image and which in no way signalled a fundamental shift – the band’s members remained more or less true to their interests in the extreme in sexuality, violence, art, crime, and documentary culture in all their subsequent projects (they merely expanded them) – may be interpreted as follows. Prior to any valuation and to any inscription in political, moral, or even nihilistic narratives, the intolerable and the painful are an aspect of all technological and medial entertainment culture. Medial entertainment is a form of aggression against a nervous system at rest, a synchronising, collectivising blizzard of signals pouring in on it in the midst of its harmonious connection with a contemplative individuality usually coded as bourgeois. The assessment of such entertainment as aggression may not be tenable, however; it is meant to be understood here as a neutral description. It might just as easily be described as an impulse, an inspiration, or – with Walter Benjamin – an innervation, that famous “bodily innervation of the collective” framed by Benjamin as a step toward revolution in his essay “On Surrealism”4, and which he continued to describe in his Passagenwerk (Arcades Project) as his “favourite idea”.
Benjamin is one of the authors who are most often cited in this context, because he never denies the violence of entertainment with media but he also doesn’t evaluate it univocally or from just one vantage point. Nor, however, does he remain ambivalent. Just as innervation, the provision of the organs with nerves and hence sensitivity, was a revolutionary project, so acceleration and fragmentation (to the point of the staccato stimulus of journalistic reporting) contributed to the destruction of experience that had begun to inundate everyday life with the onset of modernity. Nevertheless, for Benjamin, it was the relatively old media of the printed word; the capitalistic, commodified organisation of urban everyday life; and of course the mechanisation of Fordist factory work that were responsible for this destruction, not the new media of photography and especially film, whose approach to its recipients and to the world that it depicted he continued to liken to the invasive interventions of a surgeon5 (by contrast with the benevolent laying-on of hands of the old family doctor as a descendant of the magician). Benjamin hints at the possibility that through innervation and surgical art, experience, already lost, might have a chance of returning in a form more appropriate to the times.
His friend Theodor W. Adorno, of course, took a more sceptical view of the entire phenomenon. Nevertheless, Adorno and Horkheimer also located the source of the new media’s effect of mass deception, not directly in their potentially painful, direct, and high-resolution invasiveness and intensity, but in the indifference of their content and their resulting solidarity with an ideology which sought to produce docility and compliance. The violence of entertainment is always first violence within entertainment. At most, the frequency and omnipresence of the “fungible isolated moments”6, the fact that they float free of any concrete location and are infinitely combinable, lead in principle – as in “pain through entertainment” – to the destruction of the subject, which is deprived of the opportunity to reflect and to distance itself autonomously. It was only in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, which saw the emergence of a middlebrow critique of the culture industry in West German arts and culture sections, along with a notion of consciousness-conditioning inspired by William Burroughs, R.D. Laing and the Anti-psychiatry movement, and the Foucauldian genealogy of institutions, that the withdrawal of experience through medial violence came to be interpreted as a conditioning, disempowering force whose effect derives not from the content of the media but from the mere fact that media are used, as when Godard says of a film that is bad in this sense (it is a product of the entertainment industry but left-wing in its argument) that it is “like a woman who says ‘I love you’ while punching you in the face”.
The dominant form of the critique of medial violence combines the critique of the violence which technological media practice with the critique of the violence they show, as in this famous citation from the Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in reality receive their beatings so that the spectators can get used to theirs.”7 That the violence of the entertainment disseminated via technological media is thoroughly disempowering and desubjectifying is a view that is rarely questioned by authors who come out of Critical Theory until well into the 1980s; instead, they spend their time detecting cycles of exacerbation and intensification. For some, however, like the film critic Frieda Grafe, at a certain point enough was enough. In late 1976, when the first Ramones LP had already been released and TG was already working on their first album in the Death Factory recording studio, Grafe wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “Adorno’s incisive analyses of the culture industry’s products can easily spoil one’s enjoyment of Mickey Mouse. When that happens, a good antidote is S.M. Eisenstein, who used Disney’s ‘melodious rhythm’ as his example when explaining the crucial importance of rhythm in film to his students.”8
In fact, rhythm may indeed be seen as the link between the surgical aggression of the technological media and their content. Frequency and emphasis concern the resolution, density, and texture of signals, broadcasts, and the noisy emanations of the ghost in the machine. The overarching structure of frequency and emphasis, rhythm, becomes a grammar that makes possible something like meaning. In the different ways signals come together into rhythms, they make certain offers to the subjects that move among three extremes:
1. The sense of a radically individual, sovereign disposition;
2. The sense of a necessary connection between every meaning and a surrounding collective that ratifies the rhythm;
3. The sense of a necessary submission, a surrendering of control – be it on the part of an aesthetically experiencing subject or a group, and regardless of whether the act of surrender is enjoyed (masochistically or as a sovereign gesture) or experienced as torture and extinction.
It would be a mistake to assume that all of the instances of “entertainment through pain” discussed in this essay are exclusively to be found in the third extreme and its milieu. On the contrary, in my view they all involve mediation between experiences of the first two types, which confirm and generate a subject or collective, and experiences that suspend the latter’s control. It is no accident that the hard, asemantic aesthetic has been embraced wherever especially marginal, endangered, and dangerous subcultures have sought to establish themselves, from Muslimgauze to Whitehouse, from Hanatarash to the early Laibach, whether their content was politically left-wing or right-wing and whether it involved sexual politics or a “deviant” approach to diet and nutrition: clearly, a relationship exists between the noise of the asemantic and the precariousness of a highly specific semantic dimension with which it is then connected.
While Adorno did not mention Mickey Mouse, whose rhythm Frieda Grafe invokes in her article, but the far more delicate case of Donald Duck, the latter may provide an even stronger justification for her argument. Sergei Eisenstein, whom Grafe pulls out of her hat, is in fact a chief witness with regard to the phenomenon under discussion. For Eisenstein is one of the few artists and thinkers of technological media who knew and named the violence of the media himself and did not demonise it. However, Eisenstein does not elaborate their character directly from cinema (despite the fact that he associates the attraction, which he views as cinema’s central category, with that violence) but from its precursors, such as the Grand Guignol theatre of late 19th Century Paris:
“An attraction (in the theatre) is every aggressive moment in the theatre, that is, every element that exposes the spectator to an impact on his senses or his psyche that has been experimentally confirmed and mathematically calculated to produce a specific emotional shock in the observer …”9 As is clear from the examples he cites, what Eisenstein has in mind with this passage is not primarily content (such narrative shocks as “the poking out of eyes or the chopping off of hands and feet on stage”10) but physical attacks like “a salvo under the spectator’s seats as a final chord.”11 In Soviet cinema, these were means for welding together the collective; the latter was supposed to be innervated in order to escape from conventional psychological narration and its associated sense-making reflexes and be forced to develop other narratives, to find new ways of making clear to itself what it was experiencing.
Of course, at some point the Soviet director fell under the same suspicion of manipulation and conditioning as the Western makers of animated films. However, the accusations of a kind of behaviouristic conditioning, whether from ideological or commercial motives, that were leveled against Hitchcock’s admission that he was “playing” the audience “like an organ” as well as against pornography faded more and more into the background in the postwar period. More and more frequently, stimulus and attraction are described – although not explicitly – in terms of a contrary figure like the one I used earlier to juxtapose the logic of torture and TG’s agenda. The direct physical kick is something like an inverted trauma: if trauma is a phenomenon in which more of a subjectivity is broken than would have been absolutely necessary in order to process the destructive experience, the kick involves an excess of harmony between the triggering of a stimulus and its processing. Earlier, for example, in the view of Eisenstein and Disney, such an excess was only possible in the darkened movie theatre that brought together collectives; it took the latter’s magical logic of exception to achieve it. In the kick-oriented cultures that have emerged since the 1960s, and especially since the 1990s, the context of the collective is less and less necessary.
This too is due to rhythm, in cinema as well as music: pain, stimulus and attraction, the incursion of shock and reality through pain, high resolution, etc., are always punctual phenomena. Through rhythm, they break free from the content-based contexts that complete the apparatus of conditioning and manipulation and permit another context to arise. To the extent that the cultural and culture-industrial products that work with stimulus, attraction and pain are freed from the performative monopoly of movie theatre and concert hall, and public performances increasingly form an indissoluble connection with intimate reception at home, the recipient increasingly comes to have specific stimulus kicks at his or her disposition. The simplest such kick is still identification with the howling of the guitar effects that are initially experienced as cacophonous but are also desired, and their inscription within an active emotional narrative. But as the stimulus attacks take on a life of their own and become more sophisticated, the possibilities are multiplied for inscribing the passive experience of overwhelm, masochistic pleasure, and the non-identifying kick within the context of one’s own life.
What the middlebrow critique of the culture industry’s conditioning and manipulation has in common with its more sophisticated siblings is the horror of passivisation. Especially where both types of critique are combined, little distinction is made between an intellectual, ideological passivisation and a sensory, nervous one; both are accused of using violence to put the subject out of commission and give over its reflexive sovereignty and its capacity for critique to conditioning. However, the decisive development of recent decades – and pop music cultures have played a central role in this process – has clearly been the discovery of a distinction between different forms and different scripts of passivisation, as well as of the relationship between these passivisations and other faculties and states that play a role in subjectivity. Pain is an important category in this development. Pain in general is considered to be a passive experience; in most languages it is not actively produced but inflicted upon the person in pain. What is at issue here is precisely such experiences, a sovereign surrendering of the sentence subject “I” in favour of a grammar in which I become an object and something comes over or overcomes me.
The artist and theorist Hito Steyerl recently wrote in an issue of the New York journal e-flux: “Traditionally, emancipatory practice has been tied to a desire to become a subject. Emancipation was conceived as becoming a subject of history, of representation, or of politics. To become a subject carried with it the promise of autonomy, sovereignty, agency. To be a subject was good; to be an object was bad. But, as we all know, being a subject can be tricky. The subject is always already subjected. Though the position of the subject suggests a degree of control, its reality is rather one of being subjected to power relations. Nevertheless, generations of feminists – including myself – have strived to get rid of patriarchal objectification in order to become subjects. The feminist movement, until quite recently (and for a number of reasons), worked towards claiming autonomy and full subjecthood. But as the struggle to become a subject became mired in its own contradictions, a different possibility emerged. How about siding with the object for a change? Why not affirm it? Why not be a thing? An object without a subject? A thing among other thing? A thing that feels.”12 And here Steyerl goes on to quote from The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic by Mario Perniola: „To give oneself as a thing that feels and to take a thing that feels is the new experience that asserts itself today on contemporary feeling, a radical and extreme experience that has its cornerstone in the encounter between philosophy and sexuality … It would seem that things and the senses are no longer in conflict with one another but have struck an alliance thanks to which the most detached abstraction and the most unrestrained excitement are almost inseparable and are often indistinguishable.”13 Quite apart from any general assessment of this experience and of the more general ideas that may be associated with it (including the fashion for the various so-called object-oriented philosophies), it quite accurately captures the type of aesthetic experience that is crucial to industrial and techno and to many of the neo-tribalist subcultures that have emerged since the late 1980s.
In this context, it should also be remembered that in the anti-capitalist cultural critique as well, passivity and hesitation, indeed unmanliness in general, the feminine, male homosexuality, but also heterosexual vanity, posing, wanting to be seen, fashion consciousness, etc. were initially regarded as weaknesses. Famous documents of Critical Theory, including those of the Frankfurt School, are more or less explicitly homophobic. A lack of virility is regarded as the mark of a flawed or failed subjectivity; at best, those who fall into this category are to be pitied as unfortunate victims of capitalism – less, however, of its repressively disciplinary side than in the sense that the women and feminine men in question are seen as engaged in a mimesis of the commodity; they are themselves like commodities; weak-willed, interchangeable, and use-value-less.
In this light, the aesthetic of overwhelm (Überwältigungsästhetik) – and from a traditional critical perspective, kick- and pain-based aesthetics fall into this category – is seen as a deliberate weakening of subjects. But there are two forms of this weakening: the involuntary form that “happens to” those who are debased and reduced to the status of objects, and the other kind of weakening which those who have not just begun to be bored with fully developed subjectivity but who suspect that even the full-fledged and actively responsible subject may simply be issuing a political disclaimer and is usually simply doing its duty permit themselves to experience. The two formulas “pain through entertainment” and “entertainment through pain” do not map cleanly onto the opposition between passivisation and activation/subjectification. Unless one is willing to conceive of all the things observed by the culture-industry thesis, along with all the situations described by paranoid Burroughs-based theories of manipulation and conditioning, as a single monolithic pain programme, which doesn’t care whether it produces responsible but therefore limited underling subjects or passivised proletarian objects, since all, in the final analysis, are put in pain by permanent entertainment. I realise such an interpretation has something of the objectionable flavour of the wholesale cultural critique, of left-wing Nietzscheanism and other childhood diseases of a cultural critique that reaches from punk rock to Badiou. I do not believe, for example, that the citizens of a democracy and the objects of a dictatorship are interchangeable. But I need a pointed and perhaps overstated cultural critique like this one to let the outlines of the entertainment-through-pain programme come through more clearly.
What I wish to credit TG for is finding a slogan that strips to its programmatic essentials a real, if you will materialist counterprogramme to all cultures of submission, however one wishes to construe them, whether as spectacle, sedation, or conditioning. At the centre of this programme are:
1. Voluntary, savoured passivisation, the preference for a script over a subjectivity based on self-identity – a passivisation, however, that is not in turn some thing but rather a pain: a high-pitched whine, a sawing, a tattoo needle;
2. The memory of the uproar and shock-based signals of cinema and other popular entertainment as the production of collectivity and simultaneity – while these have been lost, the semantically empty signals that rouse and summon one to everything imaginable are placeholders for the old carnivalesque collectivity and equality of popular culture;
3. The enjoyment of stimulus and attraction as acts of aggression in the Eisensteinian sense means enjoyment of and contact with the asemantic objectivity of the medium, not with some halfbaked content.
Just as Op Art and Pointillism attempted to make seeing optical, so the Eisenstein-TG line sought to bind the aesthetic to the material causes of the effects which produce it. In order to initiate the sovereign suspension of sovereignty, voluntary submission requires a scenario of “strong stuff”; it is reality overwhelming me, not God, not the absolute … no, rocking, blaring reality down here in the realm of the material.
I believe that these three components of an aesthetic of submission to pain, attraction, and stimulus play a central, underappreciated and repressed role particularly in pop music but also in other recent media arts that – as always with pop phenomena – merge into the culture of everyday life. By way of conclusion, I will now list their disadvantages. The rectification of a subject-oriented aesthetics with masculinist overtones based on a simplistic notion of autonomy cannot simply rest content with its negation; there were some good reasons for those aesthetics. The question that always arises in connection with the pure asemantic effect is one of context. What stories are told by way of experiences with that effect? Above all: in what genres is it routinely inscribed? And here, as I suggested earlier, it is often as if the fans were taking dictation from the music’s critics. Time and again, the contexts, generic as well as specific, are archetypal societies, primitivism, and tribalism, but also solstice celebrations, archaisms, and other frequently problematic stories. And these stories often function as supplements of the asemantic effect in whose company they appear: they overrun it. In the early days of pop music, the situation was reversed: crazy sound effects overran and subverted the semantic dimension of love songs.
Things become even more problematic where this problem is recognised but incorrectly addressed, where artists believe they must and can keep the effect pure. In the long run, of course, an asemantic effect that is pure of any meaning, purely medial, is pure metaphysics. The effort to maintain it only produces another monster: the purity of the effect with all its attendant Futurist aberrations. Finally, there is also the possibility of context avoidance, and this is perhaps the most high-minded option, since its intention is to sever the unholy alliance of industrial music with SS men or other bastards as well as to keep from losing oneself in a Futurist worship of crassness. This is precisely what people like Merzbow are doing. The disadvantage is that a logic of escalation becomes problematic over the long run. All one can do is get louder and louder and more and more piercing, and one still ends up as a friendly little dance combo in the universe of strong tastes and drugs.
It was probably best for the pure effects to be directly hooked up to physicality in such a way that the bodies did the narrating themselves in the most compelling and accurate fashion: by dancing. In many respects, this is the best way to become a thing, an object buffeted to and fro, and still with sufficient headspace free to observe oneself and others with pleasure. In this sense, Throbbing Gristle’s early lounge efforts were quite shrewd. That was probably the best contextualisation for this extremism: the cocktail.
- Goodman, S., 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. ↩︎
- Daniel, D., 2008. 20 Jazz Funk Greats. New York and London: Continuum. ↩︎
- The cover of the LP Heathen Earth (Industrial Records IR 0009) included the sentence: “… can the world be as sad as it seems?” ↩︎
- Benjamin, W., 1980. “Der Sürrealismus: Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II.1, Literarische und ästhetische Essays. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Herrmann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. PP 295-310. ↩︎
- Benjamin, W. 1980. “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.2, Abhandlungen. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Herrmann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. PG 495. ↩︎
- Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. 1971. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1971. PG 147. ↩︎
- Ibid. PG 124. ↩︎
- Süddeutsche Zeitung, vol. 32, no. 301, 28 December 1976, as quoted in Frieda Grafe, Schriften, vol. 11. 2007. Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose. PG 118. ↩︎
- Eisenstein, S.M. 1974. “Montage der Attraktionen”, in Schriften 1/Streik. Edited by Hans Joachim Schlegel. Munich: Carl Hanser. PG 217. ↩︎
- Ibid. PG 218. ↩︎
- Ibid. PG 221. ↩︎
- Steyerl, H., 2010. “A Thing Like You and Me” in e-flux journal. no. 15. PP 4-10. ↩︎
- Perniola, M., 2004. The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic. New York and London: Continuum as quoted in Steyerl’s essay. ↩︎