The Logic of Sensation in the Institution of Live Music by Architecture+Philosophy

THE LOGIC OF SENSATION IN THE INSTITUTION OF LIVE MUSIC

A Colouring-in Book by Anja Linna

Supervisor: Dr. Hélène Frichot KTH School of Architecture May 2012

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction

2-3

A First Encounter With Affect

4-5

Sensation As Rhythm

6-7

Sad, But Pleasant, Songs

8-9

Music Kissing Architecture

10-11

Visibility Is A Trap

12-13

Exhibitions And Seeing

14-15

Control Societies And The Music Industry

16-17

Resistance - Exuberance And Exhaustion

18-19

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION This is a colouring-in book with eight different chapters about affect and the institution. The first half of the texts deal with the concepts of sensation and affect. The second half of the texts deal more specifically with institutions, such as the prison and the museum, power relations and societal questions. The texts and images are a result of my first encounter with the concept of affect and through the texts I explore the ways in how it can be useful to apply to architecture and more specifically institutions of society, giving room to questions of subjectivity and power.

How can then a live music performance be said to be part of an institution?

What I experience useful with the concept of affect is that it is non-reducing and therefor allows for complexity, which can be used to resist limiting and narrowing norms in society. We don’t have to reduce an experience in order to enjoy or experience it fully. It problematises the notion that we can break down everything in small components in order to understand it. There is though a risk for the critique to be generic or vague, since affect avoids clear accounts of what it is, how it works and what the effects of it is. But in combining it with an institution I hope to make fruitful explorations.

There is a long history of live music performances which creates a liturgy with habits, rituals and rules, that influence the behaviour in the institution. The participants of a live music performance usually take on the roles that they are expected to. There is a clear distinction between artist and viewer and their separate spaces, the audience are not on stage but the artist is, the audience is supposed to give their complete attention to the performance, a transaction of money from the audience to the artist is usually assumed. Furthermore everyone is agreeing on the intention that the music piece delivered has evolved further than just being notes and human beings. You can’t really deconstruct the experience into simple pieces, it is supposed to be experienced as a whole. You could say that people usually expect something more of the experience than they get from just listening to recorded music. It could be seen as an intention, from all participants, to create more layers to the experience, connected to feelings, emotions, associations and affect.

The coloring-in book is built upon eight different episodes that examine sensation and its circulation in the institution in different ways, based on readings throughout the course. I have chosen to relate the texts to music and more specifically, the live music performance on a stage as an institution.

Then there are of course various ways to break with the liturgy. You could draw parallels to Bertolt Brecht´s ‘verfremdungseffekt’ in the theatre, in which the performance is stripped of its self-evident, familiar and obvious effect, creating astonishment and curiosity. There are, in other words, ways to experiment within the institution.

Then there are power relations within a live music performance. What power relations between performer and audience is set up with the layout of the space? What about the people that work behind the stage? And then there is the question of who actually can take part in the event. Who can be the performer or the audience? These questions will be highlighted through the four last chapters. I have built on my personal experience from music performances, from a child performing to family and friends, to a teenager performing in a classic orchestra in a Swedish small town, to playing at diverse stages for indie music today, ranging from small cafĂŠs to festival stages, rock venues and art galleries. My experience is furthermore as much to be in the audience, listening and watching live music. Finally, to mention the illustrations in a few words, I have combined fast hand sketches with photographs in a collage method in most of them. I wanted to catch the sensation I had from reading the texts to each chapter and from writing the reflection, and to let the images spark the imagination of the viewer. Happy colouring-in and reading!

Affect as music

â&#x20AC;&#x153;How to begin when, after all, there is no pure or somehow originary state of affect? Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon.â&#x20AC;? Seigworth and Gregg, 2010, p 1

A FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH AFFECT What is affect in the context of critical studies and architecture? Or in cultural studies? As described by Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader (2010), the concept of affect is somehow diffuse: “How to begin when, after all, there is no pure or somehow originary state of affect? Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon.” (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010, p 1) Affect “emerges out of muddy, unmediated relatedness” and it gives way to “thresholds and tensions, blends and blurs”. (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010, p 4) In their initial description, Seigworth and Gregg further declare that affect is states of relations and passages of forces or intensities. Affect is in the intensities that transfer between bodies and it is affect that drive us towards movement and thought. Untangling the concepts in “Feeling, Emotion, Affect” in the theme issue of M/C Journal on affect (2008), Eric Shouse likewise states that affect plays an important role in deciding the relationship between our bodies and our environment. Since affect is unformed and unstructured it is easily transmittable between bodies (human/nonhuman/objects). According to Shouse, it is here the powerful force of affect lies, giving interesting consequences to aspects of norms and power relations, collective and private. How the intensities of sensations transfer between bodies and how they in their turn relate to the world around them, could be seen as giving spatial implications to affect.

How does affect relate to how bodies act in space? Is there a risk of that the abstract notion of affect gives way to normalized, general views of bodies and space? Seigworth and Gregg do anyhow state that the issue is never the generic figure of “the body” but a singular body. Common for Seigworth, Gregg and Shouse, is the emphasis on the potentials of affect. The potentials for action and responses, the potentials of becoming otherwise, that which is not yet determined. Here lies something very interesting: affect is movement and process, in itself potentials for exciting futures, even though they could be both hopeful and fearful. Both Shouse and Seigworth refer to music when they describe affect (Seigworth specifically in the article about indie-musician Sufjan Stevens in “The Affect of Corn” in the M/C Journal). This is also when some of the content of affect becomes easier to grasp for me. In a music experience the intensity of sensation on a body can “mean” more than the meaning of the music itself. And yes, it can be hard to put words on what exactly creates that sensation or affect.

Gregory Seijworth and Melissa Gregg , ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ in Gregory Seijworth and Melissa Gregg eds. The Affect Theory Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Eric Shouse, ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’, M/C Journal 8.6 (2008). 25 Nov. 2011

Rhytm and sensation

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The rhythm runs through a painting just as it runs through a piece of music. It is diastole-systole: the world that seizes me by closing in around me, the self that opens to the world and opens the world itself.â&#x20AC;? Deleuze, 2003, p 35

SENSATION AS RHYTHM When Deleuze starts describing the importance of rhythm to sensation, there is an apparent analogy between painting and music, connections Deleuze also makes himself. I will firstly go through the notion of the Figure and then focus more on how rhythm is connected to sensation. In Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation Gilles Deleuze gives a philosophical study of the paintings of 20th Century artist Francis Bacon. As Daniel W Smith writes in the introduction, the question Deleuze asks the work of art is not “What does this mean?” but “How does this work?”. Deleuze’s interest lies in the sensation of the paintings, how the paintings instantly flutter the nerve impulses of the viewer. In the chapter “Painting and Sensation” Deleuze states that there are two ways for painters to go beyond the merely figurative and illustrative in art: abstraction or “the Figure”. While the form of abstraction is addressing the brain, the Figure is a sensible form that is related to a sensation and as such it acts immediately on the nervous system. Sensations work on several levels at the same time, they are accumulated and coagulated in the Figure. Deleuze later on in the chapter give a phenomenological explanation to the different levels of sensation, that is that they refer to the different sense organs. Each domain of sensation is simultaneously referring to other ones. There is an existential communication between a color, a taste, a smell, a noise that creates the sensation.

But, Deleuze stresses, this is only possible if the sensation is in contact with “a vital power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all.” (Deleuze, 2003, p 42) The power Deleuze is talking about is rhythm. And rhythm is what “... appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting when it invests the visual level.” (Deleuze, 2003, p 42) This is the logic of the senses, a logic that is not rational or intellectual. Sensation’s relation to rhythm is crucial. “The rhythm runs through a painting just as it runs through a piece of music. It is diastole-systole: the world that seizes me by closing in around me, the self that opens to the world and opens the world itself.” (Deleuze, 2003, p 42-43) This power of the rhythm of a sensation, the power of closing in the self and opening it up to the world at the same time, is a beautiful description of the effect and potential of art or music experiences. Through the rhythm the viewer or listener is drawn into the painting or the music, being both subject and object at the same time. Deleuze’s writings on Bacon can help explain the highly physical feelings and sensations created by an experience of music. “As a spectator, I experience the sensation only by entering the painting, by reaching the unity of the sensing and the sensed.” (Deleuze, 2003, p 35)

Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, London: Continuum, 2003.

Sad songs that make you happy â&#x20AC;&#x153;The level of intensity is characterized by a crossing of semantic wires: on it, sadness is pleasant.â&#x20AC;? Massumi, 2002, p 24

SAD, BUT PLEASANT, SONGS I sometimes wonder why sad songs make me happy. Of course it’s hard to say whether a song is purely sad or happy (can we ever make distinctions like that?), but it happens that a clearly melancholic piece of music fills me with something I could describe as joy. Reading Brian Massumi I realized this feeling or experience could open up a door to an understanding of affect. Massumi writes in “The Autonomy of Affect” that the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect. The strength or duration of an image’s effect on the viewer, or a film about a snowman watched by children in Massumi’s example, can be called its intensity. “The level of intensity is characterized by a crossing of semantic wires: on it, sadness is pleasant.” (Massumi, 2002, p 24). According to Massumi the affective can vaguely connect what is normally indexed as different in a semantical or semiotical ordering of experience.

In the interview “Of Microperception and Micropolitics” from 2008, difference and variation are stated by Massumi to be valuable qualities of an affected politics, also identified as micro-politics. As in other writings on affect we have encountered in the Logic of Sensation course, Massumi also emphasizes the potential of affect. Affect seem to offer potentials in many ways: potentials for difference, numerous outcomes, multiplicity, non-determined repetition and liveable experiences. Not reducing or simplifying, micro-politics opens up for inventiveness and creative variation. “Micropolitics is what makes the unimaginable practicable. It’s the potential that makes possible.” (Massumi, 2008, p 20)

The expression event is important for understanding images in relationship to language. If intensity is another word for affect, the event is the effect of intensity. “Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox. It is the suspension of the invariance that makes happy happy, sad sad, function function, and meaning mean.” (Massumi, 2002, p 27)

So, coming back to my initial thoughts, there is no wonder why it is easy to put music experience in relation to affect. It is often difficult to explain in words exactly what we have heard or experienced in an experience of music. Experiencing live music, it can seem ephemeral and fleeting and emotionally complex. Is that why we sometimes try so hard to control music? In the institution of the music school, repetition and note reading bring a sense of control and discipline to what in many other ways is a very playful experience. Could we use the concept of affect to indulge more in the multifaceted and bodily event of music?

While will and consciousness reduce complexities that are too rich to be expressed, Massumi argues that affect allows for difference and multiplicity.

Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Brian Massumi, ‘Of Microperception and Micropolitics, in Inflexions online journal, no. 3, October 2009. http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/

Live music expanding the boundaries of walls and roof

“...the coming together of two similar but not identical surfaces, surfaces that soften, flex, and deform when in contact, a performance of temporary singularities, a union of bedazzling convergence and identification...”” Lavin, 2011, p 5

MUSIC KISSING ARCHITECTURE In Kissing Architecture Sylvia Lavin shows how the concept of kissing can be used as a critique on the discipline of architecture and question its supposed authority and autonomy. The medium of video art, exemplified in the work of artist Pipilotti Rist, can produce a dialogue with architecture, a feed-back that can change both the installation/ the art piece and the architecture. The concept of the kiss is radical in its gentleness and softness, its sensuality and act of embracement. Lavin states that architecture lacks and has for a long time resisted the kissing’s ephemerality and consilience. A kiss is “...the coming together of two similar but not identical surfaces, surfaces that soften, flex, and deform when in contact, a performance of temporary singularities, a union of bedazzling convergence and identification...” (Lavin, 2011, p 5) Kissing interrupts how faces and facades and surfaces communicate, making questions of affect and force more important than representation and meaning, Lavin states. (Lavin, 2011, p 14) In the installation Pour Your Body Out by Pipilotti Rist in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the art of Rist “kisses” the interior space of the museum, and by doing so it offers “a vivid moment – the pulsating pink swerve itself – of intense affect in the otherwise opiated milieu of MoMA.” (Lavin, 2011, p 22) Rist’s installation give affect to the otherwise dull architecture of the museum.

Lavin’s text offers an understanding of the interplay between live music and the space that contains it. Can a music performance “kiss” an interior space or architecture in the same way as the work of Pipilotti Rist questions the space of MoMA? But how can it move beyond merely the surface? Music is not interacting with surface, it is a more complex relationship. Could you then claim that live music can expand the boundaries of a room, in providing an experience that lets its audience feel and be affected, that let them forget the here and now of a space? A live performance is always influenced by the room that contains it and the specificity of the experience of it is dependent of its setting. But still I think that musical performances can “kiss” architecture in the way that it provides for softening, flexing and deforming the container, bringing affect to the experience.

Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Collage of viewing mechanisms in Möller Haus

“… she is caught in the act of seeing, entrapped in the very moment of control.” Colomina, 1992, p 82

VISIBILITY IS A TRAP The architectural model of Panopticon embodies the mechanisms of the disciplinary power in its most perfect form. Panopticon is a architectural machine that assures the automatic functioning of power, in that the people inhabiting the space are themselves the bearers of power, controlling themselves. They are seen, but never see; they are objects of information, but never subjects in a communication. Bodies, surfaces, lights and gazes are all relating to each other in an intricate weave of power, control, registration and observation. In order to function in a disciplinary way the power at work in institutions such as prisons, hospitals, schools and workshops has to be unspectacular and seemingly transparent. This is also one reason why the architecture, the layout of spaces, organization of bodies in it, has an important role in the exercise of disciplinary power. When Foucault describes how and why the prisons became the systematic mode of punishment, he draws attention to the twofold function of the prison, which are not only the deprivation of liberty, but mostly the assignment to change and improve individuals. The prison is an extreme model of the exercise of the disciplinary power, since the interns are processed during constant discipline. The procedures of all other disciplinary mechanisms are carried out in its most intensity here. The lives of the interns can be regulated and observed in extreme detail, deciding over time and space to eat, sleep, work, talk, move, everything concerning the body all the time. The disciplinary power exemplified in the prisons produces subjects, it normalizes and differentiates. As Foucault effectively shows us, individuals are carefully fabricated in the mechanisms of the disciplinary, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. “We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are parts of its mechanism.” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1977, p 217)

Architecture is part of the disciplinary mechanisms forming us as subjects. To see is to have control and power, to be a subject in communication and not an observed object. Foucault’s writings on the disciplinary power is closely connected to gender theories of the gaze, vision and subject/object positions. Sight lines create power relations, something Beatriz Colomina investigates in readings of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier houses in the article “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism”. About seeing architecture as a co-creator of power relations and subjects, Colomina also writes: In her analysis of Möller Haus, by Adolf Loos in Vienna 1928, Colomina looks closer at a part of the living room that is elevated. A platform holds a sofa with its back towards a window. A person sitting in the sofa has her gaze turned inwards the building and she sees anyone who would enter, therefor somehow controlling the house. The space create a comfort through a combination of intimacy and power. (Colomina, p 76). But, simultaneously as the platform creates a kind of superior protection, it draws attention to itself. When someone entering sees the person in the sofa, she who used to be a voyeur become objectified through an other’s gaze: “… she is caught in the act of seeing, entrapped in the very moment of control.” (Colomina, 1992, p 82) In Of Other Spaces Foucault describes the countersites that all relate to the more dominant spaces in society, but in a suspecting, neutralizing or subverting manner. Heterotopian spaces can have potential for subversion and change. Is it here my investigation of music comes in? As potential spaces of opposition and resistance to dominant patriarchal culture. Foucault show us the importance of investigating and questioning the seemingly rational, humanistic and transparent. Not to order, categorize and normalize, but to allow for the complex multiplicities of humans. Beatriz Colomina: “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism”, from Colomina, Beatriz (ed.) Sexuality and Space, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, Cop. 1992. p 8 Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’ in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin, 1991.

Collage with photos from the Chicago world exhibition in 1893. To the left the Womans building designed by Sophia Hayden and to the right a Sami family exhibited in the ‘Midway Plaisance’ , the ‘entertainment’ part of the fair. For interesting reading see Katarina Bonnevier in ‘Blonda hus, vita dräkter’, in Mode. En introduktion, Dirk Gindt and Louise Wallenberg ed., Raster förlag.

EXHIBITIONS AND SEEING In “On the Museum’s Ruins” Douglas Crimp suggests that the museum, alongside with the prison and the mental asylum, is another institution that should be analysed in Foucault’s terms. With the example of a Flaubert novel he explains the museum functioning as a collector of an absolute heterogeneity and through it questions of origin, causality, representation and symbolization are involved. The museum further relies on fiction to create the meaning of objects, founded in a belief that ordering and classifying can produce a representational understanding of the world. Crimp’s analysis is seen as a bit narrowing by Tony Bennett, who further develops it in the chapter “The Exhibitionary Complex” in The Birth of the Museum. Bennett explains that the emergence of art museums was closely linked to a wider range of institutions, such as history and natural science museums, national and international exhibitions, department stores and more. These institutions all served as sites for development and circulation of new disciplines, their discourses and development of new “technologies of vision”. Bennett states that the museums further developed the functions of the Panopticon, combining it with the concept of the Panorama. As I suggested in my previous reflection upon Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment, Beatriz Colomina’s analysis of Loos and le Corbusier houses is suggesting somehow more complex vision relations in architecture, changing roles of to see and to be seen, to positions of being a subject or an object. Colomina’s analysis opens up to an understanding of subject and object positions influenced and created by gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality. The exhibitionary complex functions in a similar way, complexly making people both subjects and objects of knowledge at the same time:

“Yet, ideally, they sought also to allow the people to know and thence regulate themselves; to become, in seeing themselves from the side of power, both the subjects and the objects of knowledge, knowing power and what power knows, and knowing themselves as (ideally) known by power, interiorizing its gaze as a principle of self-surveillance and, hence, self-regulation.” (Bennett, 1995, p 63) For example, the Crystal Palace combined spectacle and surveillance, it was arranged so that everyone could see, but there were also vantage points where everyone could be seen. The world exhibitions sought to make the whole world, past and present, available in the assemblages of objects and peoples they brought together, and to lay it before a controlling vision. Bennett shows how museums and other exhibitionary institutions have formed the nation-state through the ordering of things and people in a imperialist (and racist) manner, while creating a unified audience. The museums were important in the fostering and forming of citizens, enabling working class people to be inspired and learn from the manners of middle class people, creating certain forms of behaviour. The museums organized space and vision to function as organs for public instruction. What music institutions of the time that functioned in a similar manner as the exhibitionary complex? National anthems were created as part of a bigger manifestation of the nation-state, with a similar role of fostering one people, formed by norms and cultural ideals. I think several cultural institutions were informed by the same ideas as formed the museums of the 19th Century, including music ones, even though they maybe not were attracting as large audiences as the world exhibitions or the big museums. You could compare the museums lay-outs with music halls and opera houses, creating spectacles in where you watched othTony Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London: Routledge, 1995, excerpt, pp. 59-79. Douglas Crimp, ‘On the Museum’s Ruins’ in Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto Press, 1985, pp. 43-56.

Networks and control

“It’s a capitalism no longer directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets. Thus it’s essentially dispersive, with factories giving way to businesses.” Deleuze, 1995, p 181

CONTROL SOCIETIES AND THE MUSIC INDUSTRY In his “Postscript on Control Societies”, Gilles Deleuze describes the transitions from societies of confinement identified by Foucault (with their institutions of disciplinary power) to societies of control. With the big institutions breaking down into smaller units and seemingly offering us more freedom (the functions of the hospital being distributed by community clinics and home care for example), the controlling mechanisms of society could be seen as spreading throughout the body of the society even more. The business as a model for society and the changing form of capitalism are important factors in Deleuze’s explanation of control societies. While 19th Century capitalism was concentrated on production and property ownership, capitalism today (or in 1990 when the text is written) is of a different kind: “It’s directed toward metaproduction. It no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells finished products: it buys finished products or assembles them from parts. What it seeks to sell is services, and what is seeks to buy, activities. It’s a capitalism no longer directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets. Thus it’s essentially dispersive, with factories giving way to businesses.” (Deleuze, 1995, p 181) I would like to draw parallels from the capitalism of the control society to the creation and growth of the music industry in the 20th Century and, later, the resent changes in the “music market”. Through the changing mode of capitalism and technological development, a cultural expression such as music could be recorded and mass-produced, turning it into a commodity on a global market. It became possible to make money on music, with a growing music industry as a consequence.

These forms of markets could be seen as part of the control societies Deleuze is describing, more focused on the product, its sale and distribution. The products of music are also intertwined with other cultural expressions and the formation of different “styles” and cultural identities. Clothing and retail companies started to appropriate and sell styles based on, among other things, different music styles (hip hop, grunge etc.) In the 20th music could also become a way of selling other products through commercials, part of the free floating market of capitalism. The control mechanisms, as Deleuze describes it, self-transmuting, changing from one moment to the next. The economical crisis many “Western” countries go through today, could be described as a crisis for capitalism as we know it. This is also true for the music industry, where the big companies have lost a lot of their status and where the decrease of record sales promote big changes in the market. One could ask oneself if we today through our extending use of interactive media, do we as users or consumers actually have more control over the music market, avoiding big record label companies and speculations in money? Changes in recording techniques enable people to make records in their bedrooms and then launch themselves “from underground”, using the internet and channels such as myspace, youtube, facebook, twitter to handle their music distribution themselves. But in regards to the control mechanisms Deleuze is describing, one could argue that our extensive use of “new” media, through the Internet, also makes us more vulnerable. If internet actually controls us in its way of accumulating information and facts about our usage of it, what happens when that information is put in the hands of totalitarian regimes? The new FRA-law in Sweden allows the state to record and save all telephone and mobile text message communication from all people in Sweden, and in the coming weeks the Government will vote for (or against) a law that could enable the police to get access to the information even when there is suspicion of only a minor criminal activity (that could leave to a fine). Down-loading music could be a criminal activity like that... Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’ in Negotiations: 19721990, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Exuberant, political music performance - Pussy Riot in Russia.

“If, living under the pressure to perform, we begin to see that a state of exhaustion is a horizon of collective experience, could we then understand this experience as the point of departure for the formation of a particular form of solidarity? A solidarity that would /.../ lead us to acknowledge that the one thing we share – exhaustion – makes us an inoperative community /.../. A community, however, that can still act, not because it is entitled to do so by the institutions of power, but by virtue of an unconditional, exuberant politics of dedication. In short, because, as a community of convalescents, we realize in an empty moment of full awareness, that we care.” Verwoert, 2010, p. 70-71

RESISTANCE - EXUBERANCE AND EXHAUSTION Jan Verwoert describes the high performance culture of today in Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, and potential ways of tackling it. We no longer just work, we perform, prove ourselves, do things and go places. “We” are the socially engaged creative types “who invent ourselves by exploring and exploiting our talents to perform small artistic and intellectual miracles on a daily basis.” (Verwoert, 2010, p 14) Verwoert’s view of the consumer society has aspects in common with Deleuze’s writing on control societies from last week’s readings. The consumer society of today proclaims to be founded on the principle of limitless choice, but actually there are only predefined options: “We encounter it in a moment of suspicion (if not paranoia) when we dimly sense that our willingness to perform might be elicited under a false premise of opening up limitless possibilities – which is, in fact, merely pressure to enact predefined options and thereby enforce the system of control that defines them.” (Verwoert, 2010, p 18) So, is there a way to resist the need, demand and norm to high performance? What silent but effective forms of non-alignment, non-compliance, uncooperativeness and reluctance do we find in everyday life? Verwoert finds tactics in the notions of “I can’t”, “I can” and “I care”. Performing the “I can’t” can be a way of agency, interrupting a cycle of supply and demand, avoiding the pressure to produce for the sake of production. Verwoert gives punk music as an example of this tactic, through its performance of the unwillingness to submit to industry standards of what music can or can’t be, and how professional musicians should act. The punk music scene of the 1970:s can therefore be said to challenge the consumer society.

There are obviously potentials of live music to not confirm to the fast delivery associated with the high performance culture that Verwoert describes. Live music can create moments were meaning lie latent, since it is not always easy to find a “meaning” to it. It is allowed to be complex and not crystal clear, repetitive and delayed. Of course there are also forms of live music that are expected to be more direct in its delivery and message, but the potential for transmutation exists. Even simple pop songs can be transformed and morphed into on-going fluidity on stage, without any clear starts or ends, even though it may upset the audience. A very up-to-date example of the potentially vast political consequences of live music performances and the threat towards society they can be seen as, is the arrest of three members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot in Russia in February this year. The women are accused for “hooliganism” after performing a “punk-prayer” with lyrics such as “Virgin Mary, become feminist / Virgin Mary chase Putin away” in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow. (http://freepussyriot.org/about, 20120515) The Pussy Riot performance had a very clear political message though, while performing in an energetic, colorful way. You could say that they performed the exuberant “I can” that Verwoert describes, an exuberant performativity that interrupts the order of things. But, in doing so they clearly crossed the line for what is accepted for a music performance in Russia today. The alleged members of the band (they perform in masks) risk up to seven years imprisonment. Could this be described as a moment of exhaustion, when all options for further action are emptied, that Verwoert discuss in the end of the chapter? Hopefully then, convalescence will provide potential for a state beyond it. Jan Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion an Exuberance’ in Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, Sternberg Press, 2010. http://freepussyriot.org/about, 20120515

BIBLIOGRAPHY BOOKS Tony Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London: Routledge, 1995, excerpt, pp. 59-79. Beatriz Colomina: “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism”, in Colomina, Beatriz (ed.) Sexuality and Space, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, Cop. 1992. p 8sity Press, 1995. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’ in Negotiations: 1972-1990, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, London: Continuum, 2003. Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’ in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin, 1991. Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Gregory Seijworth and Melissa Gregg , ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ in Gregory Seijworth and Melissa Gregg eds. The Affect Theory Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Jan Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion an Exuberance’ in Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, Sternberg Press, 2010.

JOURNALS Brian Massumi, ‘Of Microperception and Micropolitics, in Inflexions online journal, no. 3, October 2009. http://www.senselab.ca/ inflexions/ Eric Shouse, ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’, M/C Journal 8.6 (2008). 25 Nov. 2011

INTERNET