Still Thinking About Burial
April 2, 2020
A sound system can be understood as a technology for producing space, consolidating and autonomising local time, neutralising it through the cancellation of metronomic difference. Rhythm both dissolves temporality and resolves narrative interiority: a becoming-time of space at its edges. Time is the becoming-extensive of intensive space, the crust that contains and defines it. Leaving the club is always an encounter with hostile temporality experienced as a loss of shared space.
The fragmentation of rhythm and foregrounding of the medium in Burial’s music conveys temporality as shattered. Mark Fisher described it as a mourning for the lost futurism of rave: “Ravers have become deadbeats, and Burial’s beats are accordingly undead.” But this loss of global temporality can also be seen as a side-effect of the loss of narrative space produced by the sound system in its local cancellation of the present. Burial’s music can be read as striving to reestablish this lost space, a paradoxical attempt to recover the sound system’s collectivising spatiality in the solipsistic locale of headphones. (If Peter Sloterdijk is right that spatial fragmentation is an immunological response, then headphones are surely its frontline antibody.)
Fisher emphasised the continuity of Burial with dub’s phono-centric sensibilities, its granting of a “privileged role to voices under erasure.” The denarrativised voice is the source of the undead in Burial’s music, of its spectrality and mourning: the presence of a humanity stripped of agency. But it is not really the beats that are undead, per se. In Burial’s disjointed rhythms there is a different kind of presence, neither dead nor undead, but inorganic. Percussive elements are defiantly autonomous, clattering material processes in themselves. They are poised to disperse, yet hang together nonetheless. Rhythmic unity in Burial operates according to a principle of solidarity (historical contingency), never identity (definitional necessity). It is this sense of narrative contingency in the inanimate, a certain autonomy in matter itself, that replaces the lost human agency and reestablishes narrative space. The drainage of potentiality from the human sphere is answered by its rediscovery in nonhuman matter. It crystallises in the socialisation of the inanimate, in the yearning of urban debris and the pathos of machines.
For Fisher, the slow cancellation of the future represented a naturalisation of the dyschronia Frederic Jameson saw as characteristic of the postmodern (Fisher, 2009). No longer experienced as jarring or eerie, culture has seen a flattening of the ironic dimension in pastiche and its anachronistic remixing of past forms. The same tricks which were once offered as ironies are now presented with the full revolutionary earnest that modernism reserved for formal innovation. Irony gestures to the impossibility of an imaginable real; when the real is no longer imaginable anxiety for its absence disappears with it. It is the closure of Baudrillard’s simulatory envelope, final elimination and replacement of the real by its reproduction.
This closure, according to Baudrillard, is always a process of symbolic ambiguity resolving into semiotic transparency, a reduction of a symbol whose referent is hidden and contestable to a sign whose meaning is exhausted by its differential relations to other signs. This reduction can be understood as an exorcism of unknown potentialities and their replacement by a relational essence, of the substitution of opaque particulars by transparent universals. If there is any possibility of a materialism in Baudrillard it lies in the recovery of ambiguity and the antagonism of the hidden.
The inorganic agencies that crowd together in Burial’s rhythms are thick with hidden potentials and hovering antagonisms. Their frail alliances are always ambiguous in their contingency, and it is because of (not despite) this that the space they inhabit is fundamentally social. Empathy is only possible across difference, and solidarity lies in the alignment of purpose between actants that could be doing otherwise. The electricity of garage lay in its antagonistic yet solidary unification of a single human and a single machine agency. In a landscape haunted by the traces of lost human agency, Burial reclaims narrativity by multiplying antagonisms in the nonhuman.
References
- Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.