The noisy spectacle of capital

The rebel noise of freedom

Mr. Andros, the dead

Noise is best defined as interference.
– Simon Reynolds, 1990, p.55

When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real
beings – dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic
behavior.
– Guy Debord, 1962, p.11

The consequences of capitalism in the modern society are the responsible

factors for the birth of Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967). There he argues
that reality becomes a fake universe of “images” that mediate the subject’s relation to
real life alienating one from it. This phenomenon also changed many paradigms of
society’s everyday life, everyday environment, therefore changing social, political
and artistic practice paradigms as well. The spectacle is responsible for the
fragmentation of life in separate individual cells that less and less connect to each
other at a social level (e.g. religion, art, science, philosophy, etc.).
Throughout this essay I will try to relate nowadays spectacle to art and its
relevance in our social-political environment to express a force of resistance to it, a
struggle toward freedom. For this purpose, I will finally focus on the topics of noise
and free improvisation, regarding formal, aesthetical, political and social issues I
consider to provide it with coherence and strength as a form of rebellion against this
spectacle.

Vanguards Art Life

One may consider that throughout western history, the art of the avant-garde
has always had a significant political importance, and cannot ever be detached from
its cultural and social-political contexts, for it functions as part of and directly merged
to them. The search of the vanguard artists for new forms of expression,
representation, aesthetics are searches for new ways of the artist himself relating to
nature (understanding nature as the whole environment around us, either organic or
artificial), as best as one can, being whom one is. This can clearly be understood as
the search for newer or purer forms of freedom, the embracing of life through art and
a proposal of a new world.
Modernists (such as the Dadaists) from the beginning of the 20th century were
already questioning the industrial revolution’s society and the consequent sectioning
of life by the new economic system that was capitalism. “Art” was questioned, and
modernists intended to abolish the reigning idea of art of that time in order to dissolve
it in a wider and freer concept of life. John Cage was a post-Duchamp inheritor of this
philosophy, and his written and sound works corroborate that. Cage states that ‘Art =
imitation of nature in her manner of operation’ (1982), supporting Adorno’s
aesthetical theory that ‘Art doesn’t imitate nature [physically or morphologically], nor
any singular natural beauty, but the natural beauty itself’ (1969). Cage searched a way
of melting/clashing the act of creation (intention) with the natural happening of life
(non-intention), which, would ultimately sum up to equal the only possible form: life;
for the splits subject-object, art-life disappear.
These splits Cage talks about and tries to destroy, which separate things that
cannot be tore apart from life, can in a way also be acknowledged in Debord’s
criticism of modern society’s political-economic system.
Capitalism functions as the main reason of this division of life. Capitalism
works as a generator of “images” (i.e. representations, mental conceptions) of a reality
that is not the real one, an adulteration of reality, which works only in favor of that
fake reality – the spectacle. The spectacle is the one responsible for the separation of
life from life’s social relations (also maintaining the social classes system), creating
an illusory world divided in independent cells which we call specialties: philosophy,
religion, art, science, etc.

The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are
based in isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation.
– Guy Debord, 1962, p.15

The Spectacle and Art

We can consider Debord’s concept of spectacle as a form of noise, for it

works as an interference, a spectre that blurs the perception of reality, which alienates
us from real life, keeping us in a misconception of the real that is mediated by images
we mistake as life. This kind of noise is the abstraction that fills the standard
environment of the modern metropolis, materialized in pictures, sounds and social
relations. In our everyday common lives, we are constantly raided by images and
sounds that impose themselves imperially on our own personal space, which we
quickly learn to ignore consciously, maintaining it as background, environmental
noise, while on our everyday repeating bus trip to work/home.
This noise of life consumes people.
Art, today, is bourgeois. There is little interest in visiting galleries or museums
for they work as cemeteries of images we can’t swallow anymore; they are an
organized exposition of more anesthetic white noise, which is just another cell of
spectacle. Artworks become decorative trinkets and galleries become bourgeoisie’s
“pubs” or “catwalks”.

There is a widely held view that beauty and harmony are a lie, presenting a
bourgeois vision of nature and society as fundamentally balanced and ordered.
– Simon Reynolds, 1990, p.56

Art has fallen into the numbness of the reigning economic system by
becoming one of its sectors and gave up being the exaltation of life to become just
another commodity, merchandise.

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.

– Guy Debord, 1962, p.17

The ruptures and achievements of the vanguards of before are kept as mere
beautiful memories of actions taken as experiments with no outcome and joint back to
the same spectacle we’re drowning in today. Culture is now just another image.
Museums are cemeteries of dead poets. They bear history of humanity as artifacts of
spectacular imagery. Museums are institutionalized prisons of free spirits and
thoughts of yore. They retain philosophical and political “bombs” like big bags of
money. Art becomes currency.

When nations grow old, the arts grow cold and commerce settles on every tree.
– William Blake, 1800
Improvising noise

Capitalism is a system that has no philosophical pretensions, which is not in search

of happiness.
– Slavoj Zizek, 2009, p.25

When art is being this corrupted by capital and getting further and further
away from life, the ones who intend to create ask themselves what path to take? What
to strive for? What’s the pertinence of art? What should it be in society and how
should we use it?
As stated before, art strives to complete freedom of human expression and
can’t ever be detached from its social-political context; therefore, the role of the
creator should be reconsidered when freedom should be the goal. Art acts as a
political stance and political stances are reflected in the arts practices.
Ways have to be developed in order to resist the threats to our creative
freedom from the reigning economic system, the spectacle. Art needs to descend from
its intangible ivory tower to become a communal experience where social relations
are explored through one’s individuality instead of one’s individuality being explored
by an alien social circle.
This is something that can be achieved in an improvised environment. In free
improvisation, what happens is the direct creative (therefore the freer possible)
relationship between people. The distinction between the “player(s)” and the
“audience” is to be blurred for their relationship becomes symbiotic as they both share
the same environment. This doesn’t mean it must be a pleasant experience, just, stuff
happening at a specific time and space, an environment, a situation.
Immediacy happens and should be empowered, explored. A time-based piece
is only about the moment it develops in. There isn’t the attempt to achieve divine
goals, therefore, an improvised piece must be a reflection of the relation between
people in the time period it is constrained in, the social effect, the exploration of the
moment-site characteristics and variables.
A recorded piece means nothing when not audible, unlike the tree that falls
alone in the forest.

The music occupies the time and space of its production, and only that.
 – Paul Hegarty, 2007, p.50

Free improvisation is directly related to noise, for it consists in one’s liberation

from the pre-established formal conventions that confine “styles”, and free
improvisation is the conscious resignation to style other than one’s self output in
relation to the surrounding environment in a specific time space.
We may say that noise is a more specific case of free improvisation, where “anti-
virtuosity becom[es] a virtue [and there is] a nihilist approach to improvisation”
(Mattin, 2008, p.173).

Pornography is the unconsciousness of sex. So, Noise is the unconsciousness of

music.
– Merzbow, 1997

Noise is something that is unpleasant, something that gets in the way

disturbing the point of focus. It is something annoying.
Noise music is the exploitation of that, with the difference that it is in fact the
point of focus when it is played; therefore, the perception is changed.
Noise is the absence of meaning, just violent expression. Therefore noise
music represents a reflection of reality, in the way that it brings the spectacle down to
real life. It reflects the noise that keeps life from being real, the alternate reality that is
fake. It directly interferes the spectacle of images and presents itself as violence,
disorder, nonsense, freedom. It is what human beings are about when freed from any
kind of social treaties; it is a full release from self. It is not about consciousness, it is
not about intellect, but about direct pleasure, jouissance.
Noise, unlike music (let’s put it this way), is not in the search for greater forms
of harmony, its goal is not divinity but humanity instead. It is a reach out to nature
and not god, understanding nature as something as reachable as humanity, for our
nature is humanity and that is the way we are inserted in nature.

[Noise] is a radical deconstruction of the status of artist, audience, and music.

– – Csaba Toth, 2008, p.27
–
Noise is radicalism, it is resistance, counter-culture, hedonism. It is the
subversive product of the industrialized world of late capitalism.

The effects of (…) culture are too much noise everywhere. I want to make silence by
my noise.
– – Merzbow, 1997
–
Noise is the beheading of Perseus by Medusa.
Noise is Mythos as opposed to Logos.
Noise is Human and Reality.
Noise is Freedom.
 Sources

Adorno, Theodore, 1969. Aesthetic Theory. New York: The Continuum

International Publishing Group Inc.

Blake, William, 1800. On the Foundation of the Royal Academy.

Cage, John, 1961. Silence. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Debord, Guy, 1962. The Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press.

Grosz, Elizabeth, 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the
Earth. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hegarty, Paul, 2007. Noise/Music: A History. New York: The Continuum

International Publishing Group Inc.

Mattin, et al. 2008. Noise and Capitalism. San Sebastián: Gipuzkoako Foru
Aldundia-Arteleku

Toth, Csaba, et al. 2008. Noise and Capitalism. San Sebastián: Gipuzkoako
Foru Aldundia-Arteleku

Merzbow, 1997. ‘The Beauty of Noise’: An Interview with Masami Akita of

Merzbow. In Cox, Christoph & Warner, Daniel eds., 2006. Audio Culture—Readings
in Modern Music. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.

Reynolds, Simon, 1990. Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock. In Cox, Christoph
& Warner, Daniel eds., 2006. Audio Culture—Readings in Modern Music. New York:
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.

Žižek, Slavoj, 2009. First as Tragedy,Then as Farse. London: Verso.