Electric Revolutions: Some Splicing/s on Technology, Drama, Music, Streets

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            In Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” the tape recorder Krapp has (in a word) prothseticized (perhaps read as an irreducible relationship with or dependence upon technology for everyday meanings) is arguably not so much killing Krapp (or a sign or flag of/for a death-in-technology of some kind) as it is a messing in binary-mechanical life: Krapp switches off, for example, winds the tape back a little, bends his ear closer to the machine, switches on (59). (This is stage direction 57 of 139 in all; the actor’s movements [‘off’ and ‘on’] are so programmed here that we must soon make stops at terms of robotics or automation.) When ‘play’ becomes recording, though, a dictated and produced prewriting of directions, borders, or self-information (the enregistrement Deleuze and Guattari will speak of), there are then two recordings of this actor, or two actors of this recording: “Krapp’s Last Tape”; by the title, it is taping which is ‘played’. If at the end of this play-recording both actors are silenced, one ‘runs on’ in silence and the other is ‘motionless staring before him’. The tape continues playing nothing and Krapp continues staring: the reel-to-reel ‘plays’ but plays silence; the eyes ‘see’ but see nothing; the sexual energy logic of binaries says both Krapps are finally to be ‘turned off’ but remain ‘on’ (stage): the curtain is drawn before the tape ends, before Krapp dies; no exit. (But then what ‘Krapp’ remains? after the ‘last tape’? But the recording is already over, and someone switches the tape off backstage, or then maybe rewinds it.)

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            If we take Krapp in Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” as over-colonized, its actions over-automated, the timing of its switches exquisitely programmed by Beckett (the god), this is also the point of departure for critiques of technology-life like that of the Freedom Club. (Stop! Wait! Stop waiting! Go!) But in Heiner Müller’s “Hamlet Machine” character-machines (Hamlets) shed, dump, empty Shakespearean functions of their baggage and also for a stripped-down slacker mechanism. ‘THE ACTOR PLAYING HAMLET’ says

I’m not Hamlet. I don’t take part any more. My words have nothing to tell me anymore. My thoughts suck the blood out of the images[i]. My drama doesn’t happen anymore. Behind me the set is put up. By people who aren’t interested in it anymore, for people to whom it means nothing. I’m not interested in it anymore either. I won’t play along anymore. (56)

And then the horrors of being organ-ized, colonized or marked cut to blissfully pure machine fantasy:

My thoughts are lesions in my brain. My brain is a scar. I want to be a machine. Arms for grabbing. Legs to walk on, no pain no thoughts. (57)

Hamlet shuts down in the first passage, de-bar-codes its self by name, divorces from a certain meaning-making or functionality, unplugs an art of drama or any interest in it as a means of ‘playing along’ (‘being good’), disses drama and loves anti-drama, but the productive (if playful) dream of desiring to be a pure (natural) machine (away from the violence of thought-scars, scar-brains, colonized play, Shakespearean can(n)ons) in the second passage stands beside the violence of a ‘true’, revolutionary drama which is both upheld and held up, a dramatic dream-to-put-into-practice of sabotage, underbelly, and overthrow like those of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Unabomber/Freedom Club:

My drama, if it would still happen, would happen in the time of the uprising. The uprising starts with a stroll. Against the traffic rules, during the working hours. The street belongs to the pedestrians. Here and there a car is turned over. . . . The call for more freedom turns into the cry for the overthrow of the government. (56) [ii]

 

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Durkee, in “Slackspace: The Politics of Waste,” writes that “[i]f the basis of slack is primarily the negation of the obligation to produce and consume, then slack is always itself produced by the consumer economy” (Brahm & Driscoll 28). So while the music of Beck, an artist from Los Angeles best known by popular culture for his 1994 slacker anthem “Loser”, could like an anti-Hamlet be said to be processed of the everyday working at anti-work[iii], certain moments of it might also be heard to be a collage of machine processes screaming a ‘here-I-am’ sort of machine-ness in multiple voices: when machines produce slack, belts loosen or screech, gears grind or rattle; the taken-for-grantedness born of forgetting the machine as machine both shatters and melts; the illusion is suddenly broken[iv]. Layers of Beck’s music even arguably sound like bad fan belts: voices slowed or distorted to near disrepair; drums clunking more than driving; guitars plodding along in dance rhythms slightly out of tune; and his words in tandem are strewn with signs and tangents of Western machinery grinding in place (but never to a halt):

choking on a bucket of muscle fuel

    landlocked and solar powered

            shredding on satan’s guitar

                        in the shadow of clinch mountain

                ghetto blastin whiskey cans

                           hairgel burrittos

    watered down demon fuzz

                          digitally remastered toothpick

                           pulsing electrified saliva

         new wave kid control

                          viking banjo hits of the ‘70’s

                             milking the k-tel

(from liner notes, Mellow Gold)

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            Deleuze and Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus on the ‘stroll of the schizophrenic’, write of where and how the machine-human might intersect a skilled ability to think + act away from stale Western time/work logic or just plain let it rot, and Anti-Oedipus finds a strolling interest rather in places where Beckett’s characters ‘decide to venture outdoors’ (2); Krapp, after all, is decidedly in a cage[v]. A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model, Deleuze and Guattari would argue: A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world; la promenade; ‘legs to walk on’.[vi] And somehow the metaphor of the cage is even less a metaphor than a reduction when one factors most prosthetic-life as necessarily ‘inside’ or private but full of some element of ‘display’: people + televisions, computers, ‘answering’ machines, cellular phones, exercise treadmills, stationary bicycles with digital readouts, electric musical instruments, video pornography, traveling aural environments of ‘personalized’ stereos with headphones or car sound systems, Internet environments. (Any public/private distinction on the last becomes more problematic, as eavesdropping into on-line ‘conversations’ is far easier than doing so into ‘real’ conversations given an omission of at all being discovered as the voyeur, but worse the recent telecommunications act passed by our government here in America reminds us that there just might be people watching to say “No, you can’t do that” for certain things and then maybe come into our houses with force.) rage against the machine will even write of ‘every home’ being ‘like Alcatraz’ at their 1992 rage against the machine LP. Their assessments could as well be “Industrial Society And Its Future”’s soundtrack:

So serene on the screen / You was mesmerized / Cellular phones soundin’ a death / tone / Corporations cold / Turn ya to stone before ya realize // They load the clip in omnicolor / They pack the nine, they fire it at / prime time / Sleeping gas, every home was like / Alcatraz / And mutha fuckas lost their minds (Track 5, “BULLET IN THE HEAD”)

Along with its own loud attack rage against the machine would add that capitalism itself has been screaming and repeating anthems with its own kind of violence: that a ‘true self’ would be a body/soul distinct from but since overcolonized by industrial/capitalist machinery. At track ten (“FREEDOM”), vocalist Zack de la Rocha says, “Solo, I’m a soloist on a solo list / all live, never on a floppy disk”. The Freedom club as an example as well doesn’t like floppy disks either. Neither does Martha in Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolf. Oh that’s floppy.

 

 

 If de la Rocha’s ‘solo’-isms here are about a ‘natural’ ego (that that ‘me’ should essentially be flesh and soul and separate or distinct from anything artificial, constructed, unnatural), let’s also allow rage against the machine’s soul/self/ego to couple to alcatrazian places (where the ‘unnecessary fiction’ of the ego, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, becomes like a prison cell or a cage where it smells awful; and here Kurt Cobain might  remind us to ‘get away’ from such homes). But the band also remains keenly aware of certain contradictions they seem to be promoting, as where their self-empowerment strategies are the sort of inside-outsideness of guerrilla tactics. At track three of rage against the machine (“TAKE THE POWER BACK”) de la Rocha raps that “In the right light, study becomes / insight // But the system that dissed us / Teaches us to read and write”.[vii]

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            Where drama meets revolution the world is the stage: Here and there a car is turned over or set ablaze. Technology first becomes both the instrument and target of destruction and at once the PA system for its own amplification[viii] (initiating first a series of feedback loops)[ix]; the Los Angeles riots of 1992, for example, a series of dramatic, revolutionary reactions to a single but generalized perceived injustice, were and are as much a creation of televisual images (of Rodney King beaten by LAPD officers to buildings burning to a white truck-driver struck against the head by a flying brick thrown by a black rioter) as they were a complex multitude of ‘real’ scenes in the streets of an urban-American setting. To a degree, then, the images, the publicized (chosen) accounts and critical media representations must be a reality of the ‘92 LA riots. Performance artist/musician Henry Rollins, for instance, giving accounts of one zone of the events of the LA riots--in spoken word and in videoed spoken word--finally agrees that ‘looting sucks’. Or while Ice-T’s 1993 LP Home Invasion--an appropriation of white-American culture’s specter of the black house-intruder--says YES to the music industry’s ability to disseminate (‘inject’) knowledge and ideologies into homes or to propagandize young people[x], ‘Race War’ (track 9) both also problematizes ‘wars’ like ‘the LA riots’ and yet calls our attention to the role of media-technology in creating racially or economically motivated violence:

Race war / people gettin’ killed in the street / blood on their feet / their ends don’t meet / And who they gonna blame it on? / Me? / Try the media / Try the TV

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            While for the now-just-commencing Freedom Club (FC) play, theory and practice are also merged in a sexualized violence[xi]: fucking up things and (certain) people’s lives; public and private are here also no longer feasibly distinct.[xii] (For example, we now can know details concerning Theodore John Kaczynski’s love life or his relationship with his mother, but his ‘manifesto’ would have it that given the amount of surveillance of and control over citizens industrial cultures must apparently employ to maintain themselves [Kaczysnki proved his own argument here], we will all eventually no longer have ‘private lives’ in any sense either.) For FC, though, while there remains a machine/nature or technology/freedom dichotomy which “Industrial Society And Its Future” claims cannot be resolved or disrupted without massive destruction of technology and technology-people, one could argue that ‘natural man’ is finally for FC also the ‘natural machine’, but more interesting here might be the places (the streets) where Hamlet-machines, “Industrial Society . . .”, and Kathy Acker meet:

Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (FC paragraph 127)[xiii]

The streets were now the property of cars. The cars were now the property of those who had real (governmental) jobs. No prostitute had a car. This is why there were almost only women in the visible world. The men who worked in the corporations spent so much time in the corporations or driving to and from the corporations inside mirrored styrofoam cars, they were no longer visible. They were dead. (Acker 110)

For “Hamlet Machine” drama is burned of Shakespearean traffic in a revelry of ‘turning things over’, of setting oedipal logic ablaze (‘A MOTHER’S WOMB IS NOT A ONE WAY STREET’ (54).), but “Industrial Society And Its Future” is out to decolonize the world’s roads of cars. Clearly though, we could choose to argue that it is more ‘the police’ who own or control the streets, or maybe one could substitute ‘cops’ for ‘cars’ in Acker’s first sentence above; or maybe cars are at last not so much the issue as is public-private space and whether or how it is controlled or propertied.