life in the wires
LIFE IN THE WIRES
THE C THEORY READER
ARTHUR & MARILOUISE KROKER editors
CTheory Books
ISBN 0-920393-21-7
Not only can one indeed judge a book by its cover but very often by its index.
This one has entries for the following:
technology 80
culture 69
power 69
language 57
media 55
speed 42
perception 39
consciousness 38
war 33
cinema 32
Deleuze, Gilles 32
identity 32
Foucault, Michel 31
architecture 29
Baudrillard, Jean 29
representation 28
desire 27
television 25
and Guattari, Felix 24
Virilio, Paul 23
Derrida, Jaques 22
aesthetics 21
simulation 18
Benjamin, Walter 15
It’s the same old same old post-left wing rhetoric; once radical thought now ossified as dogma.
Whenever you get the feeling that you’ve read it all before, remember that you have read it all before (simulation 18).
The best essay is Charles Mudede’s The Turntable which explains that hip hop isn’t music, it’s about music. The most unreadable essay (and there’s lots of competition) is Paul Hegarty’s Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music and this I must reproduce (simulation 18) for you:
“The ‘real’ noise in noise music is this (not) crossing of the line that is (not) there: noise is not the other of the other that equals the same, but the other of the other as non-line, as what cannot be the same and cannot inhabit otherness. Where Derrida is outflanked by Merzbow is that Derrida says you cannot get outside, you cannot consciously outdo philosophy with a hammer, therefore you should not do it - instead you should not attack directly; should take an interest in “timbre, style, and signature (as they) are the same obliterating division of the proper.” Why not do it? Why not do it, knowing it cannot be done, that your noise is fatally compromised, part of failure? Merzbow is the getting outside that is not the completion of a new “inside”, but an endless outside, fated to be inside only to fail to ever be because of this arbitrary and perverse relation to the inside (or organised sound). Where Derrida says “no”, Merzbow is an immanent “yes”.”
Hmmm, maybe…(not)?
Aryan Kaganof
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