Georges Sorel - Reflections On Violence

I

Georges Sorel's 1908 book 'Reflections On Violence' is an ugly, hate-filled book.

The author was a socialist war monger. He harbored a ferocious desire for violent class warfare and apocalyptic revolution. In fact, Sorel was so belligerent that he consistently used the word 'peacemaker' in a pejorative sense. 'Reflections On Violence' is seething with vituperative rhetoric against those social democrat politicians who wanted to decrease socio-political tensions in pre-WWI France.

The terrorist doctrines expounded in 'Reflections On Violence' were a decisive influence on the two most bloodthirsty ideologies of human history: fascism and Leninism. Mussolini said: 'I owe most to Georges Sorel. This master of syndicalism by his rough theories of revolutionary tactics has contributed most to form the discipline, energy and power of the fascist cohorts.' Thus, the author bears a part of the responsibility for the millions of deaths caused by the totalitarian regimes of the interbellum which were based on these ideology. Even if Sorel's part of the responsibility is small, it is still too great.

Thankfully, the historical role of these murderous regimes is played out. Why not consign Sorel's book to the place where it belongs - the dustheap of history? Why read the book at all?

I myself read the Sorel's 'Reflections On Violence' because its theory of social renewal brought about by an vanguard through the use of a violent myth formed an antecedent to the activities of dissident Surrealists in the mid-nineteenthirties. Sorel's thought contributed to the formation of Acéphale, a secret society created by Georges Bataille and others.


II

For Sorel, the highest good is aggressive action performed with a sense of impersonal consecration to the ends of a restricted, delimited group bound together in fervent solidarity and impelled by a passionate confidence in its ultimate triumph in some cataclysmic encounter.

Sorel wanted society to be a Manichaean struggle between the poor and rich classes. In his view, a socialist revolution could only be brought about by instilling into the working class a hatred of the bourgeoisie, not just hidden rancor and bitterness but open aggression. And rather than a middle class willing to compromise and negotiate, Sorel wanted the bourgeoisie to be self-confident and unashamed of their privileged situation. Why? Because only if the ruling class was unafraid to govern brutally, could the social tensions be maintained which instill vengeful revolutionary fervor in the proletariat. Parliamentarian democracy, philanthropy and humanitarianism were dangerous because they might pacify the proletariat and thereby prevent socialism fulfilling its historical role.

To inspire revolutionary passion in the proletariat, Sorel proposed that "...use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of war undertaken by Socialism against modern society." In order for socialism to succeed, it was necessary to inspire the proletariat with a mythology which extolled revolutionary violence as adventurous, glorious, superior. For Sorel, the myth which which was to enthrall the working class, was the general strike. The general strike, which Sorel conceived of as a complete catastrophe of violence, enclosed all the strongest inclinations of the working class and all its anticipations of the future; it gave "...an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions, and mental activity."

These myths were to be inspired in the proletarian masses by an revolutionary ideological elite. Basing himself on the history of the Catholic church, 'Reflections On Violence' had declared that "... the syndicates must search less for the greatest number of adherents than for the organization of vigorous elements; revolutionary strikes are excellent for effecting a selection by weeding out the pacifists who would spoil the elite troops."

From Edward A. Shils' excellent introduction: "Sorel's ethic is the ethic of a political sect living in the midst of a continuous crisis, with all the stress on purity and all the fear of contamination by the affairs of this world which mark the sect. It is the ethic of crisis, and it is of a piece with the expectation of an ever deepening crisis which is resolved ultimately only by an apocalyptic transformation in which everything is totally changed."


III

In 1936 Georges Bataille created a secret society called "Acéphale" - Headless. Members were Georges Ambrosino, Pierre Klossowski, Patrick Waldberg. Probable members were Michel Leiris, Jacques Chavy (a sociologist, translator of Max Weber), René Chenon, Henri Dubief (a historian), Pierre Dugan, Dussat, Jean Dautry and Colette Peignot. Whether Roger Caillois was a member is disputed. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was aware of Acéphale's existence and purposes, but in all probability not a member. Acéphale's members were well aware of Sorel's doctrines. Both Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois mention 'Reflections On Violence'.

Like Sorel's mythico-political sects, Acéphale was a restricted, delimited group, into which one one was ritually initiated and whose members were sworn to secrecy. The group was bound together by the performance of rituals, such as the commemoration of the beheading of Louis XVI on the Place De La Concorde on the 21st of January.

Acéphale is most notorious for a violent ritual, albeit a ritual that was never performed. Acéphale's ultimate goal was to enact a sacrifice of one of it's members. "There was another idea, hatched by Bataille, that the action of a group could be fully efficacious only if the initial pact of alliance among it's members was truly irremediable. And he was convinced that to bind their energies together, it was necessary to perform a human sacrifice. (...) I am not at all sure what transpired with regard to this projected human sacrifice. What is clear, though, is that it was easier to find a volunteer victim than a sacrificer, and so things went no further" (Caillois). The activities of Acéphale were directed towards a total transformation of society. Through the mediation of the sacrificial victim a means of communication would be established through not only between the members of the secret society, but also with society. Through this mythico-political act, social life would be stimulated and society reinvigorated. Human desires, passions, and mental activity would be reborn.

The activism of Acéphale must be seen in the light of the great political crisis of the interwar period: the rise of fascism. A fanatic struggle against fascism dominated Bataille's political life from the mid-nineteenthirties onwards. In September-October 1935, Bataille instigated Contre-Attaque, which can be seen as an anti-fascist movement related to Surrealism. Contre-Attaque was "virulently hostile to any tendency, whatever form it takes, that harnesses the Revolution to the advantage of ideas of nation or country." Acéphale was created when the Contre-Attaque fell apart, in the spring of 1936. The sacrifice that was at the center of Acéphale, should be seen as a strategy which was to bring about the triumph of Bataille's sacrificial Surrealism over National Socialist and fascist Caesarisms. Bataille's conception of sacrificial death as a tragedy was opposed politically to fascism, which denies what death is, turning it into a glamorous patriotic solution. Acéphale was a revolutionary ideological elite - but an elite of Surrealism, not of Socialism.

Like the political sects of Sorel, Acéphale was focused on violent action performed with a sense of impersonal consecration to the ends of a restricted, delimited group bound together in fervent solidarity and impelled by a passionate confidence in its ultimate triumph in some cataclysmic encounter.

When Surrealism proved to be unable to stem the tide of fascism and the triumph turned into a debacle, Bataille turned inwards. Mytho-political activism was replaced by inner experience.

Possession

In a beautifully written and highly interesting recent post on his interview with Mark Stewart for The Wire, Mark K-Punk writes:

"...one link between the post-punk trio I wrote about in the July issue (Stewart, Mark E Smith, Ian Curtis) is channeling. In order to get at what is at stake in so-called psychic phenomena (and its relationship to performance and writing), it's necessary to chart a middle course between credulous belief in the supernatural and the tendency to relegate any such discussion to metaphor: being taken over by other voices is a real process, even if there is no spiritual substance. (...) Hence another take on the old 'death of the author' riff: the real author is the one who can break the connection with his lifeworld self, become a shell and a conduit which other voices, outside forces, can temporarily occupy."

K-Punk addresses an issue which is close to the concerns of this blog: that of possession cults in relationship to contemporary artistic practices. Inspired by Current 93's concert at the Roadburn Festival, I wrote a post which implied that Walter Benjamin's Angel of History was dancing in the head of David Tibet.

I would agree with K-Punk that the author can indeed become a conduit for "...other voices, outside forces...". One does not have to accept any supernatural content to accept that more is at stake than mere illusion: the sense of being 'ridden' corresponds to a definite experience. However, in his post, K-Punk does not examine too closely which voices, which forces Mark Stewart channels: Stewart's loa is cursorily described as "...rage and utopian longings...".

Perhaps K-Punk doesn't examine these voices and forces more closely for ideological reasons, to avoid giving in to "...the dreary certainties of capitalist realism"? Perhaps K-Punk fears ruining the music's mystery?

I'm reminded of the "incident of the Mexican jumping bean", an interesting episode from the history of Surrealism. The incident "...involved a crisis about the proper methodology for inspecting freshly arrived objects into the Surrealist orbit, a pair of jumping beans. Caillois wanted to slice them open, to see what made them jump; yet out of principle, as he recounts, Breton refused to do so, for this would have destroyed "the mystery"." (sourced here). Caillois strove for a form of the Marvelous that does not fear knowledge, but, on the contrary, thrives on it.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that I come down on Caillois' side in this debate. We must slice open the Mexican jumping bean to examine the "...other voices, outside forces...". Using the proper methodology, a Marvelous bean stalk will grow from the eviscerated bean.

Black Metal As Play (pt. 2)

What can be learned about Black Metal if we discus it along the lines of the four types of play identified by Roger Caillois?


Agôn

Of course, a certain amount of rivalry is always part of any music scene; competitiveness between different localities (East vs. West Coast), countries, bands and even opera singers and classical composers (Bononcini vs. Händel) is far from unusual in the history of music. Thus, it is not surprising that competition has been part and parcel of Black Metal ever since it's Dream Time origins in Norway.

Norwegian Black Metal crowds were antagonistic to Swedish Black Metal crowds, so much so that when Euronymous was murdered many were suspicious of the Swedes. A brief conflict between Norwegian and Finnish scenes from 1992 to 1993 was known as the "Dark War". Black Metal strove to prove it's superiority to Death Metal. Black Metal as a religious undertaking sought out conflict with Christianity.

All this is well within the bounds of the usual in music. What is remarkable about Black Metal is how that competitiveness got out of hand.

These competitive games overflew the boundaries of their musical and religious arenas and degenerated into violence, directed both internally as well as towards religious, racial and sexual Others: Euronymous was murdered, Bård Eithun killed a homosexual man in a park in Lillehammer, Churches went up in flames and NSBM reared it's ugly head.


Alea

Games of chance seem to play no important role in Black Metal's web of significance. Perhaps though it's orientation towards Satanism and Paganism (Asatru and Wotanism specifically) reveal a connection to Caillois' concept of Alea. Can Black Metal's use of these religious cultures be described as 'superstitious attempts to manipulate fate'?


Mimicry

Black Metal may be the most theatrical music culture.

One of the most salient features of Black Metal is the use of black and white makeup (sometimes detailed with "blood") used to simulate a corpse-like appearance: 'corpse-paint'. The way the 'corpse-paint' is applied, points towards an affinity with the use of masks in primitive society. What Caillois writes about masks, is also true of corpse-paint in Black Metal: "[Masks] emerge in festivals - an interregnum of vertigo, effervescence, and fluidity in which everything that symbolizes order in the universe is temporarily abolished (...). Masks, always fabricated secretly and destroyed after use, transform the officiants into gods, spirits, animal ancestors, and all types of creative and supernatural powers." The mask-like corpse-paint is complemented with black and spike-studded costumes whose appearance is as much dictated by tradition as the religious robes of priests.

Bands that perform live often make use of stage props: Mayhem for example adorn the stage with staked pig's heads. Most musicians employ stage names, names which point towards mimicry of mythological or folkloric figures (for example, Emperor's Bård Eithun used "Faust" as a nom-de-plume).

The corruption of Agôn in Black Metal is closely related to the corruption of Mimicry. While it may be argued that the violence of the Norwegian Black Metal inner circle is the result of Agôn overflowing it's boundaries, it can just as well be argued that the burning of churches and the killings are the result of an excess of Mimicry, the actors identifying with their roles so strongly that vainglorious histrionics lead to real-life crime.


Ilinx

Other than with musical cultures such as Acid House (XTC), UK Garage (Cocaine), Dub and it's offspring (Weed), Psychedelic Rock (LSD) and Punk Rock (Amphetamines), there is no powerful connection between Black Metal and a single intoxicant. Drugs do not figure strongly in Black Metal's iconography. Moynihan and Søderlind's book on Black Metal, "Lords Of Chaos", is unusual for a description of a post-1960s musical youth culture in that it features no accounts of drug use.

But that is not so say that ilinx - games of disorientation - plays no role in Black Metal; on the contrary.

As Caillois points out, mimicry and ilinx are linked together in possession cults, the performance of the role of a supernatural spirit leads to trance, frenzy, delirium. Corpse-paint, performing that one is one of the dead, points towards a cold and glittering trance. And doesn't "Freezing Moon", a song that can be seen as the foundation stone of contemporary Black Metal, points towards moon-sickness, a vertiginous intoxication with the icy light, the luminescent spirit, of the moon?

At Black Metal concerts, as the audience gives in to the intoxication of the music, they surrender to mad, tremendous and convulsive movements.

But in the final analysis it is the music itself which is vertiginous, Black Metal itself is the locus of the derangement of the senses, the distortion of the guitars distorting the rational mind, the barrage of blast beats destroying the walls of duty, truth, and reason. "The invasion of ghosts, the trances and frenzies they cause, the intoxication of fear and the inspiring of fear..." (Caillois) reach their peak in that music.


Conclusion

Black Metal may well be the most playful genre of Metal. In this sense, Black Metal and Gothic subcultures are closely related.

In the 'serious' music press, this playfulness is often cause for a disdainful treatment of the genre. Black Metal kultists may feel that calling their music 'playful' makes it seem childish. But Black Metal's playfulness does not lessen it's moral seriousness. Let us not forget that the grimmest of violence is part and parcel of sports; more blood has been shed in the cause of soccer - a mere game! - than all Black Metal hordes together can ever hope to spill.

More importantly, I feel Black Metal's playfulness - the fierceness of it's Agôn, the inventiveness of it's Mimicry, the exuberance of it's Ilinx - attest to it's continued vitality.





Post scriptum

I'd like to direct your attention to Nicola Masciandaro highly interesting comment to the first post of the two-part series.

Black Metal And Play (pt. 1)

In his best-known book, "Les jeux et les hommes" (translated as "Man, play and games"), Roger Caillois - ethnographer, writer, collector of precious stones, friend to Georges Bataille, pupil of Marcel Mauss - characterized play as "...an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money". Of course, as "Les jeux et les hommes" is inspired by Bataille, waste has a positive connotation: waste provides an escape from the humdrum world of utilitarianism.

In this post and the next, I'll analyse Black Metal using Caillois' taxonomy of play-forms.

Caillois divides games into four fundamental categories: competitive games and contests (agôn), games of chance (alea), games of simulation (mimicry), and games of vertigo (ilinx).

Obviously, sports such as wrestling and games such as chess fall under the category of agôn. The point of these games is for each player to have his superiority proven in a given arena. The practice of agôn implies activity, discipline and perseverance. Other than with agôn, in alea the player cannot control the outcome. Only fate determines whether the player loses or wins; the player is passive. Alea mock meritocracy. Lotteries and roulette are examples of alea. Children's initiations and the theater can be categorized as mimicry. In these forms of play, the pleasure lies in being or passing for another. The player forgets, disguises or temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another. Finally, rollercoaster rides and the dancing of dervishes are to be categorized as ilinx. These forms of play are an attempt to temporarily destroy the equilibrium of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous disorientation on the mind.

Each of these four play categories can be corrupted. Competitive games can degenerate into violence, will to power and trickery. Games of chance can be corrupted into superstitious attempts to manipulate fate. Games of simulation can lead to alienation and split personalities. Games of vertigo risk devolving into alcoholism and drug abuse.

It might seem far-fetched to analyze Black Metal with a theoretical apparatus which is aimed at games, sports and play - especially since that musical genre's dour grimness does not exactly come across as playful. But, on the other hand, Black Metal is music. The connection between music and play is already given in the fact that it is said that one plays music. As Johan Huizinga points out in his classic "Homo Ludens" both music and play lie outside the rationality of everyday life, outside the domain of need and utility. Both play and music find their value beyond reason, duty and truth. Rhythm and harmony factor both in play and in music. Music is often performed in competitions ('Idols' is merely and unusually execrable example of this); music and chance are interrelated not only in the work of John Cage but also in musical improvisation; music often mimes; and finally, music can intoxicate.

So what can be learned about Black Metal if we discus it along the lines of these four types of play?

Mauss / Bataille (part 4)

There is a strong thematic unity between the teachings of the great French ethnologist Marcel Mauss and the work of the so-called 'philosopher of evil', Georges Bataille. This is the fourth in a short series of posts in which I take up the relations between the writings of the two men.


Bataille abandoned the attempt to found a religion based on Maussian theory when the war broke out. Probably, several different reasons caused him to change course.

First, his closest friends and collaborators - Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois - became increasingly critical of Bataille's endeavors and in the end quit Acéphale. Bataille felt abandoned by his friends.

Second, some aspects of Durkheim's sociology became increasingly problematical as the confrontation with fascist ideology became more intense. Durkheim's maxim "Society is to it's members what a god is to the faithful" assumes a completely different aspect when seen under the light of totalitarianism.

Finally, a more rigorous analysis of the meaning of the meaning of sacrifice in a world whose God is dead drove him in a direction that was not new, but more awe-inspiring.

If God in Durkheimian thought is coeval with the social, the death of God equals the death of the social. If there was no hope of resurrecting God, there was no hope of revitalizing society through sacrifice - human or otherwise. Communication through sacrifice with either an elective community or with society as a whole, had become impossible. God himself had been sacrificed - not with an eye to periodic renewal, as with the agricultural deities analysed by Mauss - but irreversibly.

But this did not mean Bataille abandoned Maussian sacrifice. Rather, he reinterpreted sacrifice as a procedure which consists in establishing (through the mediation of a victim) a means of communication between the profane world and an absence - the absence of God and the social. Communication is sought with the unchained, the disorienting, the vertiginous, an infinite nothing, an empty space, something colder, night.

In this un-social (the Durkheimian undead) sacrifice, the sacrifier and the victim are one and the same person: "Je suis la plaie et le couteau!" (Baudelaire).

And rather than the abandonment by his closest friends and collaborators and the restrictions war put on social life, I feel this profound absence of the social is the true cause of Bataille's inward turn during the war.



Post scriptum

Ceci alerted me to a book by Michèle Richman: "Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège De Sociologie", which I wasn't aware of and ordered straight away (here). Thanks Ceci!

Mauss / Bataille (part 3)

There is a strong thematic unity between the teachings of the great French ethnologist Marcel Mauss and the work of the so-called 'philosopher of evil', Georges Bataille. This is the third in a short series of posts in which I take up the relations between the writings of the two men.


In 1936 Georges Bataille created a secret society called "Acéphale" - Headless. Members were Georges Ambrosino, Pierre Klossowski, Patrick Waldberg. Probable members were Michel Leiris, Jacques Chavy (a sociologist, translator of Max Weber), René Chenon, Henri Dubief (a historian), Pierre Dugan, Dussat, Jean Dautry and Colette Peignot. Whether Roger Caillois was a member is disputed. Jacques Lacan was aware of Acéphale's existence and purposes, but in all probability not a member.

It was a hierarchical society, into which one one was ritually initiated and which knew ranks or grades. All members were sworn to secrecy.

The interbellum, and specifically Weimar Germany, was rife with 'secret societies of political assassins' (Caillois). Nonetheless, Acéphale was probably not intended to mimic the terrorist associations of 'Secret Germany'. The idea of forming a secret society for sociological action seems to have been inspired largely by Marcel Mauss's work on conspiracies. Mauss had been lecturing on that theme for some time and in 1936 had wanted to compose a text about it for the journal "Cahiers du Socialiste". "The ethnologist was well aware of the 'significant role' of 'men's organizations' in societies of the archaic type: 'secret brotherhoods very effectively ensure social stability,' he wrote. He was preoccupied at the time with the idea of 'secrecy and plotting' in politics. Following a paper delivered by Élie Halévy on 'the age of tyrannies' before members of the Société Française de Philosophie, he returned to it: 'I stress the fundamental fact of secrecy and plotting more than you do. ... Even sociologically, it may be a necessary form of action, but it is a backward form. That is no reason for it not to be fashionable. It satisfies the need for secrecy, influence, action, youth, and often tradition" (Fournier).

Acéphale's members observed particular customs and rituals. "The most important and best-known (...) remains the one by which members traveled separately by train from Saint-Lazare station to the tiny station of Saint-Nom-La-Bretèche, strangely lost in the midst of a forest, and from there, at night, alone and in silence, proceeded to the foot of a tree struck by lightning (...). There they burnt sulphur, and that is about all we know". On the 21st of January they commemorated the beheading of Louis XVI on the Place De La Concorde. "The Place De La Concorde is the place were the death of God has to be announced and proclaimed because its obelisk is the calmest negation of it". There were culinary rituals: the daily lunch was to be composed of horsemeat washed down with water (wine was tabooed during the day). Furthermore, Acéphale established moral rules: it was forbidden to shake hands with anti-Semites. No doubt these 'invented traditions' were inspired by Bataille's ethnographic reading.

Acéphale however is most notorious for a ritual that was never performed (appropriate perhaps for a headless society not to perform it's main rite). Acéphale's ultimate goal was to enact a sacrifice of one of it's members. "There was another idea, hatched by Bataille, that the action of a group could be fully efficacious only if the initial pact of alliance among it's members was truly irremediable. And he was convinced that to bind their energies together, it was necessary to perform a human sacrifice. (...) I am not at all sure what transpired with regard to this projected human sacrifice. What is clear, though, is that it was easier to find a volunteer victim than a sacrificer, and so things went no further" (Caillois). But Acéphale's ambitions went further than a mere Dostoevsky-inspired scheme to solidify the loyalty to each other by murdering one of their fellow conspirators. The activities of Acéphale were directed towards society as a whole. Through the mediation of the sacrificial victim a means of communication would be established through not only between the members of the secret society, but also with society. Social life would be stimulated and society reinvigorated and thereby saved from fascism. Thus, Acéphale was acting upon Mauss's work on sacrifice; Acéphale was applied ethnology.

Bataille: "I had spent the preceding years with an unsupportable preoccupation: I was resolved, if not to found a religion, at least to direct myself towards this meaning. What the history of religions had revealed to me had gradually exalted me". And who was France's preeminent historian of religions, the president of the Section of Religious Science at the École pratique des hautes études, with whose work Bataille was intimately familiar? Mauss!

Mauss, through himself probably unaware of Acéphale, was highly critical of the anti-rational tendencies of Bataille's coterie. In a 1938 letter to Roger Caillois on the latter's essay "Paris, mythe moderne" in "Le mythe et l'homme" he wrote :

"What I believe is a general derailment - of which you are a victim - is the sort of absolute irrationalism with which you conclude in the name of a modern myth (...). But I believe that, right now, all of you are probably under the influence of Heidegger, a Bergsonian held back by Hitlerism, legitimating a Hitlerism infatuated with irrationalism. And above all, it's the political philosophy of sorts you try to draw from it, in the name of poetry and vague sentimentality. As persuaded as I am that poets and men of great eloquence can sometimes establish the rhythms of social life, so too am I skeptical of the capacities of the philosophy of any kind (...) to establish the rhythm of anything at all." (quoted in Fournier's book).

Bataille, for a variety of reasons, would come to abandon the attempt to found a religion based on Maussian theory when the war broke out. That did not end his fascination for Mauss's analysis of sacrifice, however. In the war, he would examine the meaning of sacrifice in a world whose God is dead more rigorously than in the Acéphale period. I'll examine this development in Bataille's thinking in an upcoming post.




Post scriptum

Here is a link to an issue of the journal Acéphale.

This French-language pdf contains a biograhical essay on Patrick Waldberg.

Is Acéphale's René Chenon the same man as this mathematics professor (link)?

Was Georges Ambrosino the author of this 1960 book on nuclear physics?

Information on Acéphale's Henri Dubief: "Henri Dubief (1910-1995), agrégé d'histoire, fut inspecteur général de l'Instruction publique, vice-président de la Société d'histoire du protestantisme français, auteur de La Réforme (Rencontre, 1965), La Réforme et la littérature française (La Cause, 1972), de divers ouvrages historiques et de collaborations à des revues scientifiques". Amazing that someone involved in a conspiracy directed towards human sacrifice could become inspector-general for public education!

Mauss / Bataille (part 1)

There is a strong thematic unity between the teachings of the great French ethnologist Marcel Mauss and the work of the so-called 'philosopher of evil', Georges Bataille: sacrifice, the sacred, power, shamanism, secret societies are themes that were taken up by Mauss and figured largely in Bataille's oeuvre. This is the first in a short series of posts in which I take up the relations between the writings of the two men. The posts are based upon Fournier's biography of Marcel Mauss, Surya's biography of Bataille and 'The Edge of Surrealism', a Roger Caillois reader. This being a blog and not an academic publication, I have omitted footnotes and references.


Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) was the nephew of the founder of French sociology Émile Durkheim, and in many ways he was the heir to his uncle's intellectual legacy. Mauss's most famous works are "Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice" (written with Henri Hubert in 1899) and "L'Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques" (1923). Mauss was not only active in academic circles, but was also a leading figure in the left-wing political scene of his era.

Bataille was introduced to the work of Mauss through his friend Alfred Métraux (1902-1963), who entered the École des Chartes just as Bataille was leaving it in 1922. Métraux had soon left the École des Chartes to study anthropology with Mauss, who was to call Métraux "one of his most brilliant students". Bataille and Métraux physically resembled each other, so much so that they were frequently mistaken for brothers. The two shared everything, "...including women in black silk pyjamas, with long gold cigarette-holders and boyish haircuts, moving around in poorly defined and rather ambiguous surroundings" (via this book). During three to four hour long morning walks along Paris's rue de Rennes or the Champs-Élysés, Métraux spoke to Bataille of Mauss and his studies of the potlach. The friendship of Bataille and Métraux would "... remain strong even after one became a great scholar and the other a great writer" (via this book). Métraux most famous work is a study on Haïtian voodoo; photos made by Métraux of a voodoo sacrificial ritual would grace Bataille's art book "Les larmes d'Eros". Métraux died by his own hand in 1963.

But Métraux was not the only friend and collaborator of Bataille that had received ethnological schooling from Marcel Mauss: Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois too were Mauss's students.

Bataille met Michel Leiris (1901-1990) at the end of 1924, shortly before Leiris was to join the Surrealists.

Six years later, Leiris was selected by Africanist and Dogon specialist Marcel Griaule to take part in the Dakar-Djibouti mission, which was organized by the Institut D'Ethnologie and financed by the French government and the Rockefeller Foundation. The mission, which took from 1931 to 1933 would "... criss-cross French West Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon, French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Abyssinia, Eritrea, and French Somaliland".

Leiris functioned as the archivist for the mission and as a researcher in charge of religious sociology - a theme that is at the heart of both Mauss's and Bataille's thought. "Parallel to his ongoing work (putting together the collection of objects), Leiris conducted two surveys; one on sigi so, the initiatory language of the Dogon society of Sanga (French Sudan, now Mali); the other on the zâr genie cult among the Christians of Gondar (Ethiopia)". Leiris was highly critical of the mission. "The expedition, he said, at times resembled tourism (in search of the picturesque or the exotic), at other times a circus (always on the move with the same show on every stop), at still others colonial plunder".

In 1933, the second issue of Bataille's Minotaure magazine was dedicated to the Dakar-Djibouti mission. In 1934, Leiris published "L'Afrique Fantôme" in which 'objective' ethnological data were juxtaposed with Leiris's personal experiences, dreams and self-doubts. At the time, this was a unique textual strategy, highly controversial in academia. Griaule, the mission leader, was furious and feared a back-lash from the colonial authorities; Mauss gave Leiris a talking-to, but "in a paternalistic, easy-going way". Nonetheless, Leiris became a student of Mauss's after returning from the mission. At the École pratique des hautes études, where Mauss taught ethnology, Leiris's 1938 thesis "La langue secrète des Dogons de Sanga (Soudan français)" dealt with the secret language of the Dogons of Sanga.

Roger Caillois (1913-1978) was another close associate of Bataille who was taught by Mauss, in his case sociology of religion at the École pratique between 1933 and 1935. There, he also studied comparative religion with Georges Dumézil and heard Marcel Granet apply Maussian ethnology to Chinese culture. His 1937 thesis for the École pratique, written under the informal supervision of Dumézil, was titled "Les démons de midi" (Noontime demons). Much of Caillois' work from the mid-nineteenthirties was serious ethnography, work which earned him praise from both Mauss and Dumézil. Mauss was especially enthousiastic about Caillois' 1934 article "La Mante religieuse" (The praying mantis), in which the author analyses the webs of mythological and erotic significance spun around that insect. Bataille, Caillois and yet another pupil of Mauss (Anatole Lewitzky, who had written a thesis on Siberian shamanism under the direction of Mauss) would create the (in-)famous College of Sociology, which attempted to find a in Maussian thought a weapon to at once combat the rise of fascism and revitalize society. Nonetheless, differing views with regards to the role of ethnological thought in society would cause a rift between Caillois and Bataille as the war drew nearer and nearer.



So there can be only one conclusion: Bataille's closest friends and collaborators were all schooled by Marcel Mauss. Even Bataille states in "L'Erotisme" that he did not take courses given by Mauss, it is certain that he was very familiar with Mauss's work. Furthermore, the density of the network between himself and the great ethnologist ensured that the latter's teachings could not fail to have an impact on Bataille's thinking. This impact will be explored more closely in a later post.

Hototogisu - "Prayer Rug Exorcism"

"The vision the eye records is always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it out with the treasures of memory and knowledge, with all that is put at its disposal by experience, culture, and history, not to mention what the imagination itself may invent or dream. So the imagination is never at a loss when it comes to making something rich and compelling out of a subject that might almost seem an absence of all life and significance." - Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, 1966


Hototogisu's album "Prayer Rug Exorcism" presents that band's Free guitar noise at it's most brutal and relentless. The four parts that comprise the album were recorded live in 2005 at four different venues: The Black Chapel in Leeds; CCA in Glasgow; Holy Trinity Church in Leeds, and Brudenell Social Club in Leeds in 2005. That the tracks were recorded live had in effect on the production quality: "Prayer Rug Exorcism" is as lo-fi as a Black Metal album.

However brutal the noise may be, it is also quite abstract, dispensing with recognizable musical structures, dispensing with conventional meaning. In a sense, the album's noise is as inaccessible as a stone, as impenetrable to the mind as a rock. "Stones have no vocabulary", wrote Roger Caillois in his brilliant 1966 book "The Writing of Stones": a book which consists of lyrical texts about the stones Caillois had been collecting since he first put his hands on a labradorite in 1952. In exceedingly beautiful passages, Caillois describes the colors, lines, surfaces, textures, shapes and forms of agates, onyx, jasper and other stones: solidified geological violence, "...more destructive and brutal than the weak force of humans". Of course, Hototogisu's noise is fast-rushing, frenetic even, far from solidified. But if one could freeze-frame Hototogisu's fast-rushing noise, the result might well be the audio equivalent of the black minerals Caillois describes.

The album's title is a rich metaphor, and indeed the music is as sinister as a fundamentalist Islamic take on the 1973 horror film The Exorcist: "The movie starts with an elderly Pakistani imam who studies early-Islamic writings in the Iraqi city of Mosul. After talking to a local, higher-ranking cleric, he then travels to a spot where a strange statue of a pre-Islamic deity stands. He sees an ominous-looking American soldier nearby, and two dogs fighting. Meanwhile a young imam at a fundamentalist madrassa, begins to doubt his faith while dealing with his mother's terminal sickness." The title led me to explore disquieting YouTube video's of djinnis being exorcised by imams (here and here and here), and mindbending examples of Pakistani ("Lollywood") horrorfilm (here and here).

It also led me to ponder at length the meaning of the word 'exorcism' in the title. 'Exorcism' at first seemed an inappropriate title for this sinister album. Aren't exorcisms entirely on the right-handed side of religion, on the side of the law and taboo, on the side of punishment? Nonetheless, Bataille wrote that laws are only created in order to transgress them - if so, are exorcisms only staged to perform an ecstatic possession by demons? Or does the title refer to a cleansing of the type Coil have talked about in their 2001 interview with Dutch VPRO Radio - noise music which is so intense that it cleanses the listener of the banalities of everyday existence?

The music itself as well as the title pointed me to Cammell and Roeg's 1970 film Performance, in which Mick Jagger plays Turner, a decadent hippie pop star who holds court in a crumbling London mansion rich in Islamic rugs. In a crucial scene in this hallucinatory film, a photograph of Jorge Luis Borges flashes in a shattered looking glass as the camera takes us on a tracking shot which follows a bullet penetrating Turner's skull. The psychedelic violence, rich in literary connotations, of that cinematographic moment corresponds exactly to 'Prayer Rug Exorcism'.

Browsing through "The Writing of Stones", I was reminded how Caillois employed a Surrealized structuralism - or better: a structuralized Surrealism - as a method to explore correspondences between stones on the one hand and mythology and metaphysics on the other. And this led me back to the first mythological association that the album called forth: Islamic exorcism. I was caught up in an intellectual feedback loop, and I started to hear a squealing, screeching, ringing noise of feedback in my mind's ear ... brutal and relentless.

Striborg - Ghostwoodlands (pt. 2)

I

"I wish I was a ghost", Sin Nanna, responsible for one-man Black Metal band Striborg's anomalous sound, states in a rare interview. Sin Nanna describes a nightly encounter with a ghost as a formative experience, and wants his music to have the same effect on the listener as that encounter had on him. In describing his own encounter with a ghost, Sin Nanna describes the haunt as a "glowing white head" which peered him at from an abandoned house. He also describes poltergeist-like disturbances, such as gushes of wind and a guitar string snapping by itself. Sin Nanna relates that he experienced strong emotions of dread, terror, panic and desolation. Furthermore, the experience made Sin Nanna feel sickened: "Whatever it was were trying to make me ill".


II

"I want to be a ghost": what a fascinating example of mimetic excess, what a mindbending play on mimesis and alterity! A ghost is an after-image of a living person: wanting to be a ghost means wanting to be an after-image of oneself, miming misesis, a ghostly mise-en-abyme, mimesis running amok. Yet at the same time, ghosts are "Other": as the undead, they declassify the categories of living and dead. The self dissolving into the fluidity of ectoplasm, Sin Nanna tries the incorporeal on for size - a costume for the theater of his Black Metal music.


III

How do ghosts and Striborg's music correspond? How do the experience of meeting a ghost and the musical form of Striborg's music relate?

Perhaps it is worthwhile to explore the thesis that the relation is mimetic in nature. Sin Nanna wants to transform himself into a ghost; is the music a mimetic transformation of the encounter with the ghost?

The production of the music echoes the image of the glowing white head. Interestingly, Sin Nanna does not use the usual trope of 'darkness' to describe his music. On the contrary, in an interview he describes the production as 'bright' - the unusual adjective the polar opposite of dark. "This is how I always produce music, bright, fuzzy, cold and distant. (...) I want my sound to be fuzzy and distant, like an audio version of literally the mist you encounter in everyday life". "Glowing white" and "fuzzy bright" - I feel these adjectives are largely interchangeable.

The emotions of dread, terror and panic - some of the emotions Sin Nanna felt during the ghost encounter - are all three closely related to that of fear. These emotions cause tension of the muscles, an increased heart rate, perspiration, dilation of the pupils and horripilation (gooseflesh and hair standing on end). I strongly feel these physical symptoms of fear are somehow bound up with features of Striborg's music, though I find it hard to put the correlation into words. Is there something gooseflesh-like in the ambient washes of Kosmische synthesizer sound that permeate the songs, the coagulations and swirls in the sound a transformation of the contraction of the muscles which elevates the hair follicles above the rest of the skin, when the skin crawls? Does the cold and thin guitar noise sound like cold sweat, like simultaneous perspiration and chill and cold moist skin? Is there something of the muscular tension and increased heart rate in the nervous, idiosyncratic percussion?

The emotion of desolation points towards feelings of loneliness and isolation, i.e. non-communication with fellow human beings. The same type of questions that I asked about fear, can be asked about these emotions. Cannot Striborg's musical style be called isolationist, in that it is seeking to be so idiosyncratic as to turn every listener away? The music is so primitive and so "totally fucking weirded out" that even many Black Metal aficionados are nauseated, sickened by it.

As for the poltergeist phenomena Sin Nanna describes: the word derives from the German verb 'poltern', meaning 'to rumble' or 'to make noise'. Thus, the phenomenon already points towards a ghost as an auditive experience. One theory with regards to poltergeists posits that these spirits are "recordings" of powerful emotions, which are believed to be engraved into the place they haunt. These recordings play themselves over and over again, like a locked-groove record. So a poltergeist is a recording that rumbles, that makes noise. And thus Striborg's music is a noisy recording that mimics a recording that makes noise - another eerie, animistic mise-en-abyme.

Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph and thus of recorded sound, spread the rumor he was working on a machine that could make contact with the spirits of the dead. Audio recordings have since their infancy been associated with ghosts. And Sin Nanna wants the listener to relate to his music as he himself related to the ghost: a deeply ambivalent relation oscillating mixing attraction and repulsion. The ghost and the recording occupy an identical space in these formations.

Ghosts have 'Wiederholungszwang' and like a ghost, Striborg's recordings repeats themselves. Album after album, the basic concepts of his idiosyncratic brand of Black Metal are repeated: wafer-thin production, demented warbling vocals, blast beats sounding as if they are played on a cardboard shoe box, confusingly arrhythmic drumming and sinister, Tangerine Dream-like synthesis. Each new album mimes the ones that came before. But it is a poorly-made copy, resembling the original as much as a voodoo-doll resembles it's intended victim ... as much as a ghost resembles the human being it once was.


IV

The motto of Surrealist Roger Caillois famous article "Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia" is "Beware: whoever pretend to be a ghost will eventually turn into one". For Sin Nanna, it may already be too late.

Deathspell Omega - "Fas - Ite, maledicti, ite ignem aeternum"

Many Black Metal bands seem to take the most-quoted line of 1994 film Pulp Fiction's Marsellus as their motto: "I'm gonna get medieval on your ass". Their aesthetic reflects the view that the medieval period was a time of drafty castles with dank dungeons, plague, poverty, torture, witch hunts, brutal kings and wall-to-wall ignorance; and true to form, Black Metal inverts the negative value attached to that era's supposed primitiveness and brutality, extolling exactly those qualities.

Black Metal band Deathspell Omega aesthetic is far from medieval - the French band's motto is rather: I'm gonna get Baroque on your derrière"!

Not that Deathspell Omega's music is dominated by the contrapuntal style, as Baroque music was.

Rather, their new album - the extravagantly titled "Fas - Ite, maledicti, ite ignem aeternum" - employs sophisticated musical techniques to create exaggerated motion and clear detail, producing drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur - exactly like Baroque visual art and sculpture. Deathspell Omega's music is characterized by the juxtaposition of blastbeat fury and chaotic riffing to complex, atypical rhythmic structures, stop/start dynamics and angular, dissonant riffs; by great drama, rich deep color, and intense light and dark shadows. There's something of Caravaggio in the best parts of the album - the painter about whom a contemporary cardinal's secretary wrote: "In (his) painting there are but vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust... One would say it is a work made by a painter that can paint well, but of a dark spirit, and who has been for a lot of time far from God, from His adoration, and from any good thought...".




Like Baroque visual and architectural art, Deathspell Omega's music is quite bombastic, sounding like a monument in sound, using it's absolutist authority to impose obeisance and fear. The band transform the racial elitism, which is so prevalent in NSBM, into an intellectual elitism. In fact, if one reads the reviews on sites like Encyclopedia Metallum, Black Metal fandom seems to be a little intimidated by the complexity of the music as well as by the obscure, even hermetic language in which the band cloaks it's Satanic theology - like a Lacan of the occult.

Deathspell Omega is on a 'mission civilatrice'. However savage the riffing may be in places, overall the music is intelligent, sophisticated, intricate; there is a measure of artificiality - in the positive (anti-"authentic") sense of the word; a sense of "good taste"; ecclesiastical decorum, even. Unlike many Burzum-inspired and neo-pagan Occidentalist Black Metal bands, Deathspell Omega do not disavow culture. On the contrary, Deathspell Omega embraces learnedness and the places of learning: the library, academia, the city. Thus, the band seems to share Baudelaire's “ivresse religieuse des grandes villes”.

The afterlife plays a prominent role in Deathspell Omega's aesthetic - first of all, in the title of the cd. Wikipedia states erroneously that the album's title derives from the comical medieval morality play Everyman - a play which is not even in Latin. Rather, the title derives from chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus foretells the Last Judgment. From the King James Bible: "Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels".

Deathspell Omega's conception of the infernal afterlife is also post-medieval. Hell is not portrayed as a place of torture: no branding irons, cooking pots full of boiling oil, tongs, pliers and blacksmith's tools for these Frenchmen. In Deathspell Omega's hell, it is the soul rather than the flesh which suffers torments or experiences ecstasies. The void of Nirvana is about as far off as Satan's medieval torture chamber. As Roger Caillois points out in his essay 'Métamorphoses de l'enfer', such a conception of Hell arose after the Middle Ages.

And let us not forget that the Baroque was also the period in which Milton published his magnum opus "Paradise Lost", which presents Satan sympathetically: as a rebel both tormented by and proud about his isolation from a tyrannical God. In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", the poet William Blake wrote: "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it". In secularized modern France, Deathspell Omega can flaunt that they are of the Devil's party; still, their Satanism is a Miltonian challenge by Satan of the Omnipotent.

Theatrical, daring, enigmatic and fascinating, I can recommend any music aficionado to throw himself body and soul into Deathspell Omega's "everlasting fire".


Post scriptum

See the comments for a remark regarding my unfair dismissal of Wikipedia.

Friday The Thirteenth: Mask

"One of the principal ethnographic mysteries is conceded to lie in the general use of masks in primitive society. An extreme and even religious importance is attached everywhere to these instruments for metamorphosis. They emerge in festivals - an interregnum of vertigo, effervescence, and fluidity in which everything that symbolizes order in the universe is temporarily abolished so that it can later re-emerge. Masks, always fabricated secretly and destroyed or hidden after use, transform the officiants into gods, spirits, animal ancestors, and all types of terrifying and creative supernatural powers. (...) The eruption of phantoms and strange powers terrifies and captivates the individual. He temporarily reincarnates, mimics, and identifies with these frightening powers and soon, maddened and delerious, really believes that he is the god as which he disguised himself, cleverly or crudely, in the beginning. The situation has now become reversed. It is he who now inspires fear through his possessing this terrible and inhuman power". Roger Caillois, "Man, Play And Games".


"Everything behind the mask is mysterious. When the mask is taken seriously, as in the cases we are discussing here, no-one must know what lies behind it. A mask expresses much, but hides even more. Above all it separates. Charged with a menace which must not be precisely known - one element of which, indeed, is the fact that it cannot be known - it comes close to the spectator, but, in spite of this proximity, remains clearly separated from him. It threatens him with the secret dammed up behind it. Unlike a face, there are no passing changes in which it can be interpreted, and so he suspects and fears the unknown that it conceals.
(...)
The true mask is something, which never changes, but remains permanently and unmistakably itself, a constant in the continual flux of metamorphosis. The mask is perfect because is stands alone, leaving everything behind it in shadow; the more distinct it is, the darker everything else. No-one knows what may not burst forth from behind the mask. The tension between its appearance and the secret it hides can become extreme. This is the real reason for the terror the mask inspires". Elias Canetti, "Crowds And Power".


So what to make of "Friday the 13th"'s mask, which first appears at summer camp, a festive interregnum when parental order is temporarily abolished for teenagers? What to make of the mask, which stays the same, constant, whether it is at Camp Lake Crystal or in outer space? What to make of that utterly impersonal, expressionless ice-hockey mask? It's whiteness is a blank - not so much signifying nothing as signifying absence; absence of a human face; absence of a human head; absence of human speech; absence of human thought. Jason Voorhees is headless, the acephalous monster, the minotaur in Camp Lake Crystal's labyrinth.

Hototogisu - Spooked Summer

In october 1936 Roger Caillois published a short essay called "Le complexe de Midi" ("The Noon Complex") in the surrealist magazine Minotaure. In the essay, Caillois explores the mythological meaning given to the noon hour in premodern societies, arguing that not midnight but midday is the original witching hour. "In ancient Greece, noon was in fact the hour of transition, marking the boundary between the reign of the Uranian and of the infernal Gods. But noon is also the time when shade is at a low point, and thus when the exposed soul is most vulnerable to dangers of all kinds. For similar reasons, noon is generally the hour when the dead make their appearance - they who cast no shadow. On the most elementary level, these are the reasons noon is preordained to witness the apparitions of ghosts. (...) The sun's burning heat is unforgiving at this suffocating time of day. Heatstroke, sunstroke, cerebral fever, and their attendant mental and physical ailments offered sufficient prove of demonic activity to persude people that they existed".

Noon relates to the day as the midsummer relates to the year. Thus, it should come as no surprise that summer is a haunted season, that summer can lay as much claim to being 'the season of the witch' as autumn or winter. At Midsummer Day, the premodern peasantry of Europe lit bonfires, walked in a procession around their fields with torches, and rolled a burning wheel down the hillside, all to exorcize the demons of the summer solstice. Sir James Frazer in 'The Golden Bough': " [A medieval writer] tells us that boys burned bones and filth of various kinds to make a foul smoke, and the smoke drove away certain noxious dragons which at this time, exited by the summer heat, copulated in the air and poisoned the wells and rivers by dropping their seed in them (...)". Summer is spooked!

And it is this that brings us, dear reader, to Hototogisu's latest release, "Spooked Summer".

Hototogisu is the nom de plume of the collaborations of the immensely prolific Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Sunroof!, Total, Pure) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, Zaimph, GHQ). "Hototogisu" is the Japanese word for cuckoo, a bird which apparently in Japanese culture is a symbol of the netherworld - an infernal bird, a spook with wings.

"Spooked Summer" is a Midsummer's Day noon hour sun of dissonant drones, blistering guitar distortion, feverish feedback, fiery freeform noise; a heatwave of sound; contemporary sun blindness music. Though beautific and hypnotising, the sound is also harsh, burning it's way though the listener's nervous system, causing hyperthermia as the mind absorbs more and more of the music's sweltering heat.

"But Valter!" I hear some of you say, "You are overdoing the references to the noon's sun for rhetorical reasons". To these readers, I'd like to point out that the image of the sun plays an important role in Matthew Bower's releases. The name of one of his bands - Sunroof! - contains the name of that heavenly body. The fifth track on Skullflower's "Form Destroyer" is called "Solar Anus"; and that band released a 7" called "Rotten Sun". Another Hototogisu release is actually called "Ghosts From The Sun" - the name could well be a direct reference to the noon complex. What's more, Matthew Bower himself refers to his music as burning light. In an interview in Wire 249 (november 2004), he said that his music sounds like having a blinding light shone in your face, and continued: "...we're channeling this intense bright light sound, all shot through with waves and sinuous ribbons. (...) White light angels flared across the retinas of my tightly shut eyes as I flayed the bass". And is it not likely that these white light angels are the very ghostly apparitions that haunt noon-time?

Hototogisu's summer is spooked, haunted, visited by apparitions of the dead, possessed by a host of hideous sun demons. However, Hototogisu's summer is apparently so disquieting that some music journalists reviewing Hototogisu feel they must dispel that uneasiness, dry clean the music, erase all stains, all lipstick traces of transgression. In their reviews, saccharine blissfulness is stressed an the expense of the fearful aspects of the music. In a review of Hototogisu & Prurient collaboration "Snail On A Razor" in Wire 274 (december 2006), Tony Herrington writes: "Unless I'm misreading something in the Hototogisu DNA, this [the Hototogisu & Prurient collaboration] strikes me as a weird hookup, philosophically speaking, because [Prurient mainman] Fernow's roaring noise sounds like some kind of sex-deathwish fulfilment fantasy, whereas Hototogisu music vibrates in multiple frequency patterns that articulates the sheer fucking elation of sensing the blood rushing through your veins more than any other music around right now, with the possible exception of Matthew Bower's solo Skullflower project". Well, we all should be glad that Herrington is no forensic scientist, because he completely bungles his crime scene investigation and DNA profiling analysis. The double helix of sex and death has been one of the main features of Bower's music ever since he started to record in the mid-to-late 1980's. Even a little superficial research into the imagery employed by Bower and his public statements would have pointed out the intimate embrace of eroticism and death in his work. Hototogisu and Skullflower are what the The Theater of Eternal Music might have sounded like if not Pandit Pran Nath but Georges Bataille, philosopher of evil, had been their guru.

So if Hototogisu's summer is haunted, what is the spook's identity? Whose ghost haunts the album? Thinking about this post, I discovered that one cannot write anymore about albums whose title begins with an adjective and ends with 'summer' without calling up the wraiths of the Beach Boys from the timeless hereafter of sun, surf and cars, as presented on their bestselling compilation album "Endless Summer". The symbolic weight of that album's title became even greater when it was appropriated by Fennesz for his brilliant 2001 glitchtronica tribute to Brian Wilson and his messengers. Perhaps Brian Wilson himself is the ghost that haunts the summer- isn't he some kind of Lazarus, one who came back from the dead, a revenant? Was it solar fire that destroyed his mind?

Perhaps the adjective 'spooked' relates to 'endless' in the same way Hototogisu relates to the Beach Boys. 'Endless' means 'unlimited in time', which is a denial of boundaries, of death. On the other hand, the word 'spook' points towards tresholds, to the Beyond, towards those who died. But the relationship of Hototogisu to the Beach Boys is more ambiguous than this bipolar structure, as both are fused together by the blazing heat of the word 'summer', becoming indeterminate and disoriented by the summer solstice sun.

Hototogisu is brilliant!








Post scripta

• The essay " The Noon Complex" is reproduced in "The Edge of Surrealism. A Roger Caillois Reader";
• Isn't the Frazer quote pure Cthulhu mythos?;
  
• More information on Japanese cuckoo symbolism here;
• Released as a cd-r, 'Spooked Summer' appears to be universally sold out - meaning that this review is in a way useless, having lost it's function in the economics of culture. To say that this review is so useless so as to become a Bataillan expenditure of opinions would be going a little too far, though: I know this white-hot album is still burning a hole in some internet forums, so you may be able to hunt it out;
• Direct Waves has some great out of print Skullflower albums for download (here);
  
• Here is a link to an interview with Hototogisu.

Post Rock Black Metal

Hard, to imagine long haired Norvegians ecstatically sacrificing black roosters to the Horned One to the gentle, placid sound of Tortoise's 'TNT', which was described by Jonathan Romney in march 1998's Wire as "...decanted from some particularly affectless encounter group, or rather, from its aftermath"...

Hard also, to imagine corpse-painted Satanists celebrating the mass of St. Secaire in a dirty, ruined, vermin-infested church to the precise and clean minimalism of To Rococo Rot, with their 'white cube gallery' aesthetics....

And hard to imagine black-clad and bloodspattered devil worshippers kissing, no licking Baphomet's smelly backside to the "...polite, considered and well read..." (Biba Kopf in Wire 178, december 1998) exoticism of Tarwater's 'Animals, Suns & Atoms'.

Why are such scenes so hard to imagine? Where Post Rock is gentle, Black Metal is cruel; where Post Rock aspires to humanist ideals, is leftward-leaning (cf. Godspeed You Black Emperor!) and politically rational, Black Metal is nihilist, subscribes to far-right ideologies and is politically delirious; where Post Rock is civilized, Black Metal is barbarous; where there is an emphasis on consonance in Post Rock, dissonance rules supreme in Black Metal; while Post Rock's musical textures are clean and smooth, those of Black Metal are ragged and dirty; Post-Rock is euphoric where Black Metal is depressive; and so on. "...I'd certainly let my daughter marry a Tarwater" grumbled Kopf in Wire 178 - and what father in his right mind would let his daughter marry a churchburning anti-christian fanaticist?

Nonetheless, more and more recent (mainly French) Black Metal is described as being influenced by Post Rock. See for example Aquarius Records' website:

• On Blut Aus Nord's recent 'Mort ' album: "Imagine all the super Slinty post rock parts from the most recent Deathspell Omega record, take all of those parts, play them all at once, some forward, some in reverse, run them all through banks of effects, and you'll have something like Mort".
• On Glorior Belli's album 'O Laudate Dominum': "...darkly melodic breakdowns verging on post rock...".
• On Deathspell Omega magisterial 'Kenose': " ...like a Black Metal Slint...".

The French Black Metal vs. Post Rock crossover is a classic case of 'les extrêmes se touchent'. But it's not just Aquarius and Les Légions Noires (i.e. French Black Metal adepti) :

• On the Sputnik Music website the reader is asked to imagine Wolves In The Throne Room's album 'Diadem Of 12 Stars' as "...Black Metal with the structure of Post-Rock, all with a folky touch reminiscent of Ulver's Bergtatt";
• On Metal Invader Leviathan's surreal 'Tentacles Of Whorror' is described as "Ranging from DARKTHRONE-like black metal, to BURZUM-dark ambient, all along with post-rock (GODSPEED YOU BLACK EMPEROR, A SILVER MOUNT ZION and even IN THE WOODS... (RIP)) and minimal electro influences..." (Caps in original).

So what are the relations between Post Rock and Black Metal? Is it just a matter of cross-genre stylistic borrowing? Or are there relations on the level of content as well as on the level of form? And aren't form and content interwoven so strongly, that even if the influence of Post Rock on Black Metal started out as stylistic borrowing, Black Metal's content couldn't escape being influenced, contaminated, by Post Rock's content?

Perhaps the distinction Roger Caillois made between Satanic and Luciferian Romanticism can shed some (un-)light on the evolution of Post Rock Black Metal. Caillois was a philosopher loosely associated with Surrealism, and contributed to Bataille's (in-)famous College of Sociology. Both Satan and Lucifer are diabolical incarnations of the sacred endowed with the dual power of attraction and repulsion. Caillois: "For me, Lucifer, as his name suggests, is the demon or angel of lucidity. And I have always made a great distinction between Satanic and Luciferian". For Caillois, Lucifer refers to disciplined, methodical, purposeful passion, rather than to inflamed passion, which is Satanic. Where Satan embodies the "spirit of rioting", Lucifer is the "spirit of conquest". In a sense, the Satanic is an orthodox heterodoxy where the Luciferian is a progressive heterodoxy (both oxymorons).

Where 'troo' Black Metal can be described as Satanic, perhaps Post Rock Black Metal can be said to be Luciferian in spirit, purposefully experimenting with instrumental work (notice the term 'work'), emphasising musical method over immediacy of emotional impact, dedicated to the conquest of new and unique textures and harmonies, aggressively appropriating elements from electronic music, jazz, and rock.

And thus we can discern the pitfalls for Post Rock Black Metal. Satanic - 'troo' - Black Metal runs the risk of losing all dynamism because of it's orthodoxy, of ossifying. Luciferian Black Metal however must seek to avoid exactly the very same errors Caillois made in his thinking.

• Caillois was an elitist in the 1930's, favoring an intellectual oligarchical dictatorship, ruling the world at an icy distance from the ruled. Such elitism is prevalent in Black Metal also, in my view one of the more stupid and short-sighted aspects of the genre. Losing contact with the wellspring of popular culture can become a risk for Post Rock Black Metal - can you imagine Blut Aus Nord following Autechre's trajectory into aridity?
  
• From the 1940's onwards, Caillois thinking lost it's creative edge because of his mind numbing emphasis on purposefulness. In an essay on the worthless treasures small children can keep, he ascribed to such treasure-hoarding the function of helping to build the ego - the poetry of playfulness put in the key of stultifying work. Distaste for the riotous leads to conformism; distaste for inflamed passion to lack of passion; the conqueror becomes a slave of conquest.
  

Post Scripta

• In "Filosofem" period, Burzum was called the Aphex Twin of Black Metal - apparently the music was interpreted as some sort of IDM/ambient/Black Metal cross pollination. Given that Post Rock can be read as an IDM/Indie Rock cross-over, the roots of Post Rock Black Metal can be said to go back to Black Metal's very origins.
  
• On the 'After The Post Rock' forum, I found a thread where some Post Rock aficionados confess to liking Black Metal.
• See also this roundup of French Black Metal.
• While French Black Metal is described as influenced by Post Rock - an American genre - much of recent US Black Metal is described as influenced by the very British genre of Shoegazer, Post Rock's dreamy forerunner (though the use of the word 'runner' in the context of Shoegazer seems wildly inappropriate!).