engleski

Death-drive in Overdrive: Early Swans as the Noise of Extinction

Ray Brassier, one of the „founding fathers“ of Speculative Realism, argues in a recent interview „against an aesthetics of noise“: „I am very wary of ‘aesthetics’: the term is contaminated by notions of ‘experience’ that I find deeply problematic. I have no philosophy of art worth speaking of. This is not to dismiss art’s relevance for philosophy—far from it—but merely to express reservations about the kind of philosophical aestheticism which seems to want to hold up ‘aesthetic experience’ as a new sort of cognitive paradigm wherein the Modern (post-Cartesian) ‘rift’ between knowing and feeling would be overcome. In this regard, I would say that there can be no ‘aesthetics of noise’, because noise as I understand it would be the destitution of the aesthetic, specifically in its post-Kantian, transcendental register. Noise exacerbates the rift between knowing and feeling by splitting experience, forcing conception against sensation.“ Taking this interview as its occasional cause, this paper attempts to do three things. First, it tries to unfold these condensed claims by situating them in the context of Brassier's philosophy in general and his other writings on noise in particular (i.e. the parts of his doctoral thesis Alien Theory dealing with noise and his article „Genre is Obsolete“). Second, it poses and attempts to answer the most obvious question arising from these remarks: what relevance could art actually have for a philosophy like Brassier's, i.e. for a philosophy committed to upholding the Enlightenment will to truth in all its nihilating glory? Finally, the paper presents an attempt at a Brassierian reading of early Swans' experiments in noise brutality known as Cop and Young God. In this regard, two sections of Brassier's book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction will be of particular interest. On the one hand, the passages on the asymmetry of pleasure and pain (exemplified by Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta’s exquisite depiction of this discrepancy) and Brassier's concomitant affirmation of the senselessness of suffering read like a perfect philosophical counterpart to Michael Gira's lyrical obsession with the susceptibility of the human body to pain and violence. On the other hand, no concept seems more adequate to the pummeling violence of the early Swans' sonic compulsion to repeat than Brassier's concept of extinction (briefly, Freudian death-drive reinscribed in a cosmic framework). Echoing the title of the paper, early Swans as the noise of the death-drive gone into cosmic overdrive.

Ray Brassier; speculative realism; noise; extinction; death-drive; Swans.

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