A captivating message for dark times
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In dark times
will it also be sung?
It will also be sung
about the dark times.Bertolt Brecht
The drums of war are beatingThe drums of war are beating again in Europe. The "endless war" that began with the century is finally knocking at the door, after having been exported to the whole world for the sake of "security". Whose security? Under the most obscenely capital-rich civilization in history, it is increasingly difficult to make ends meet everywhere. No new deposits of useful oil are being discovered to make the diesel fuel that drives ships. The ocean reaches freakishly high temperatures. Droughts and hurricanes. Mass extinction of species. Economy in stagnation. The state of emergency is already continuous. Agricultural, climatic, housing, sanitary emergencies. Capitalism, as Tacitus said of the old Roman Empire, calls peace to its extension of the desert. But in this global desert, capital has a surplus of people. And the migratory caravans are already on the move, wandering the continents. To continue as it is, the order of this world needs a good warlike hecatomb, military Keynesianism to relaunch growth. But the specter of the Kiel fleet (Kieler Matrosenaufstand), of the mutiny of soldiers returning home with weapons in hand, of revolutionary chants is the daily nightmare of the bastards who justify and spread all the pain of the world.
What sense does it make to speak of song and music when the drums of war are beating, or when, Sulamit, we are living and not just watching a live genocide? Are we perhaps to wait for a Palestinian voice that, like Paul Celan, sings to the ashes that go up the chimneys, even if they are now the chimneys of the houses and not of the fields, of the houses of Gaza turned into fields, trenches and rubble?
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night / we drink you at noon we drink you evenings / we drink you and drink / a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete / your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes / He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland / he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air / then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease / (Paul Celan, "Death Fugue" - trans. P. Joris)
"Idrissa" / Vincent Moon
Death is an Israeli Master. Death is a Western Master. So, do the trumpets of the Apocalypse sound before us or behind us? In America they sounded five hundred years ago and their echo is still very loud. Elizabeth Povinelli insists that what is important is not the Apocalypse that accompanies us but what we do with it. Against the feeling of fatality and anguish that the government of the exception tries to promote in the West, the response of the indigenous worlds is much stronger: radical rejection and haughty resistance; looking each other in the eye, lending a hand, strengthening ties and not forgetting. Do not forget that we are not alone.
Other drums, another callHere we try to call for other drums or another beat. One that takes us out of the music of the gallows and confusion that drags us down.
Thousands of potential Snowdens live around us, as the Conspiracist Manifesto said, as do remnants of communities from all over the world who live in the interstices of the modern metropolis. In the 1970s, people from southern Italy arrived to inhabit the industrial metropolises of the north, bringing with them forms of cultural autonomy, networks of mutual support and forms of struggle that set the north of the country on fire, and not only. For those forms of life to gain temperature and feed the flow of a revolutionary subversion it was necessary to go to meet them, to learn from them - not only with words but with friction; not only with unions and magazines, or with balaclavas and red flags but also and especially with the inchiesta operaia, with the workers' survey. To learn to share a listening and a hand and a look, as when a riot confronts the forces of order and the air is filled with chanting.
"Pascal Comelade" / Vincent Moon
Captivating message
From music and the nightingale comes to us a "captivating message" that it is up to us to understand, said Jankelevitch: "Good is made to be done, not to be said or known; and likewise evil is a way of committing an act rather than a known thing; good and evil are of an order if not dramatic, at least drastic. [...] Music, like God's nightingale, responds by the act and by doing: it is up to us to know how to understand the captivating message".
But there is so much confusion between "action" and "doing", isn't there? Action is political and apparently free. Doing is everyday and decidedly unfree. Paraphrasing the debate between Karl Marx and Bruno Bauer, we could say that material life is a condemnation to unfree exhaustion, and political life the consolation in the dream of liberation that binds by its very existence to the situation of dispossession. That is to say that political emancipation only emancipates politics and not the earth. The only consistent politics is that which is done against politics. What we do cannot serve as consolation: "at least we are doing something". It is not a question of doing at least something, it is a question of doing something to end the situation of dispossession. Of course, we all do something, but what we do, do we do it to win?
«Me han contado que en Nueva York, / en la esquina de la calle veintiséis con Broadway, / en los meses de invierno, hay un hombre todas las noches / que, rogando a los transeúntes, / procura un refugio a los desamparados que allí se reúnen. // Al mundo así no se le cambia, / las relaciones entre los hombres no se hacen mejores. / Pero algunos hombres tienen cama por una noche, / durante toda una noche están resguardados del viento / y la nieve a ellos destinada cae en la calle. / […] Pero al mundo así no se le cambia, / las relaciones entre los hombres no se hacen mejores. / No es ésta la forma de hacer más corta la era de la explotación» (Bertolt Brecht, Poemas y canciones).
Eduard Escoffet / "(et) parlo"
Another friend said, the important thing is to recover the dimension of play in what we do. But it would not be today the free and carefree game without being at the same time the most serious game. The one that has death behind it and survival, or better, a life worth living, a buen vivir, in front of it. A game where relationships between human beings become better. A game to make the era of exploitation shorter.
A game, a doing, whose center is not the production of something new, but the attention to what is done, to how it is done and with whom, to not being unworthy of what happens to us.
"Either morality has no meaning, or this is what it means, it has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us. On the contrary, to grasp what happens to us as unjust and undeserved (it is always someone else's fault), this is what makes our wounds repugnant, it is resentment in person, resentment against the event. There is no other ill will. [...] What does it mean then to want the event? [...] not exactly [wanting] what happens, but something in which it happens, something to come in conformity with what happens, according to the laws of an obscure humorous conformity: the Event. It is in this sense that Amor fati allies itself with the combat of free men" (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense).
For Deleuze it is a matter of counter-performing what happens to us. To sing the wound that marks us, to sing as a challenge to death and to the life that is done to us. Not to be unworthy of what happens to us. To affirm, not what happens but something "in" what happens, that which signals us from the limit of what is expressible and which allows us to counter-effect what happens, to remain haughty and proud, and not resentful, complaining and incredulous. To sing, to sing, that is to call a fire yet to be invented, a fire against fear and against the desert and against falsehood and horror. And to dance, to beat the ground until it trembles and dances on our heads.
Carmen Amaya en Los Tarantos, by Francisco Rovira Beleta
To sing is to stop being alone, even in the deepest solitude and silence. "He who perceives the totality of the melody would be at the same time the loneliest and the most communitarian", said Rilke.
To sing is to tune in, it is to be in tune with the power of sound and voice with the extrahuman atmosphere, it is bodily tension, attention, concentration and habitual use of one's own, something so difficult, as the poet said. To sing is to enter into the rhythmic and tonal flow of what exists. "Rhythm gives the measure of the immense. [...] rhythm gives access to an 'infinite connection'. [...] A rhythm articulates cadence and abandonment: not abandonment of cadence, but abandonment to it and in it. The cadence gives the measure and the abandonment to which it invites lets it lead him to the immense. It has to do not only with the fact that the cadence could be repeated indefinitely; it has to do rather with the fact that even a brief sequence entails the infinite: not the infinite of an indefinite continuation, but that of an opening that, from the outset, is subtracted from the temptation of completeness, and therefore of closure" (Jean-Luc Nancy, "Image-dance scheme").
Music and singing do not change the order of things, what they do is to call, as a fire calls and is flame.
To sing is to call what can hardly be named,
but it can be accompanied, as in the tracing of what is done;
but it can be remembered, as does the dhikr;
but it can be called, as the name does and as the hymn did, as Nicoletta di Vita has shown in Il nome e la voce. Per una filosofia dell'inno.The language commands, the word messes up, but the name calls. As music and singing - but not song, which is a learned text - call. And in the attention to their calling ignites the encounter that we are. The music or the song or the name is not a saying, but a doing. It is not the lyrics of the music that calls, the lyrics accompany as the songs accompany. It is the way of doing that calls for participation and participation is when the fire of life is lit. The medial participation, the uncountable or unidentified participation. Resonance between the volcano of the sun, the volcano of the earth and that of the heart, as alchemy used to say.
Calling the sensitive presence. Calling the one you love. Calling to friends, to girlfriends.
To call to destroy and to desert, as when the punk Sex Pistols wanted to "concentrate all the rage, intelligence and strength of their being and then throw them against the world [...] so that the world would pay for their crimes with the currency of the nightmare..." (Greil Marcus, Traces of carmine).
Call to free ourselves from a senseless debt that shackles the Earth that we are. "For a long time, we were lumped together with the story that we are humanity. In the meantime [...] , we have been isolating ourselves from that organism of which we are a part, the Earth, and we began to think that it is one thing and we are another: the Earth and humanity. I do not perceive where there is anything that is not nature. Everything is nature. The cosmos is nature. Everything I can think of is nature" (Ailton Krenak, Ideas for postponing the end of the world).
Dark Matter homenatge a Víctor Nubla / Marc Egea
What am I getting at?
Perhaps how to understand today the "communist answer" to the fundamental question recalled by Walter Benjamin in "Surrealism, the last instance of European intelligence": What comes first, the inner mutation or the change of external circumstances? Where Surrealism's answer consisted in adding the anarchizing forces of drunkenness to the discipline demanded for communist revolution. - And also, perhaps, to understand how to begin to tear that veil between us and the world that Benjamin pointed out when he said that the fundamental difference between primitive communities and the modern world was the modern impossibility of a "cosmic experience". Benjamin was saying this in relation to war. War today has become hyper-technological, hyper-communicative, and what about the cosmic experience, and the "ethical action" of which Minkowski spoke, what about them?
Perhaps another place of arrival is a question asked by Bruce Chatwin in his book Le Vie dei Canti, in relation to the Australian primitive community. He said, if the criterion of intelligence is in the use of language and the art of what is done with the hands, the Aboriginal world is far from being inferior to any other. And he wondered, then, why is it better to try to constantly change the land as the modern world does, instead of trying to "preserve it as song" as the aboriginal world does? - And here it is essential what is meant by "song".
So the chantWhat comes to me is that chant is existence - flow of extrahuman participation - that this medial flow is not the immediate, not the everyday world of things and separate figures, but is accessed there as a place of energy source, when the world of things is left in suspension, in visionary experience or in revolt, in love and friendship, in song and dance - that music is to be made, not to be talked about or used metaphysically, - that this Making is innocent enchantment, that the popular experience with music is always collective and calls for participation - that there is a connection with extrahuman forces - that the fundamental difference is ethical, between those who make things, love them and take pleasure in them, and those who try to take advantage of them, to govern, to be a bully - and that this discriminates against community participation - and today it is necessary to pull on this thread again to get out of here, to get out of the community of capital.
The fundamental question of our time is, says Santiago López Petit, how do we get out of capitalism?
To get out of capitalism, to get out of the cybernetic unification of exploitation and mistreatment, to get out of the epidemic of isolation.
Community, whatever name we give it - and it is not indifferent - is "the greatest danger" as Jean-Luc Nancy said; and it is at the same time "what calls us".
It is not a question of fantasizing about lost worlds, nor about the communality that returns from the depths of the forests to beat us over the head.
It is not about fantasizing.
It is about hitting the ground as one hits the ground in the "philosophically crazed" dance of flamenco. To hit the ground to dance in the crack and make the world dance. Deleuze proposed to leave the labyrinth "of knowledge and morality", to leave the labyrinth of reason that guides a thread of destruction. And to enter "the labyrinthine ear" of Dionysus: "The labyrinth is no longer architectural, it has become sonorous and musical. [...] What essentially corresponds to Dionysus the musician is to make the roofs dance, the beams swing. [...] For the music to free itself, it will be necessary to pass to the other side, there where the territories tremble, the architectures crumble, where the ethos mingle, where a powerful song emerges from the Earth, the great song that transmutes all the tunes that it carries and brings again and again".
O. Liubatovitch para desorg.org
Clara Peya / Vincent Moon