Industrial Music

Traduction en français du fanzine édité par RE/Search Publications dans le cadre de l'événement « Industrial Music and Experimental Films from San Francisco by Marian Wallace » (Les Voûtes, Paris, 27 mai 2016). Transcription des entretiens avec les différents artistes du documentaire Artists of the Industrial Scene, de Marian Wallace. Édition bilingue (anglais / français).

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A transcription of the film by the same name, this color-illustrated, 44-page zine takes you through 10 viewpoints of the “how” and “why” of noise music, from the late 1970s to now, with viewpoints and experiences from five different countries.

In English and French (translation by Nicolas Ballet). Interviews with 10 Industrial artists: Genesis P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle/ Psychic TV), Mark Pauline (Survival Research Laboratories), Johanna Went, Jim Thirlwell (foetus), Ryoichi Kurokawa, Ilpo Väisänen and Mika Vainio (Pan Sonic), Peter Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle), Graeme Revell (SPK), Naut Humon (Rhythm & Noise), Gerald V. Casale (DEVO).

Since the late 1970s, Nigel Ayers (b. 1957, UK) has cut a bracing, subversive path through the contemporary underground, bridging DIY industrial enthusiasms with multimedia experimentation to form a singular body of work. Co-founder of the groups The Pump and Nocturnal Emissions (along with brother Daniel Ayers and then-partner Caroline Kaye), Ayers has been a contributor to and proponent of industrial music’s high-water marks, his Sterile Records imprint disseminating not only NE sides but also defining work from Lustmord, SPK, Maurizio Bianchi, and others between 1979 and 1986. In 1987, Ayers inaugurated the Earthly Delights label with the now-canonical Caroline K recording Now Wait For Last Year, and the imprint has since served as Ayers’s primary outlet for releasing new work, whether as Magnetizdat, Spanner Thru Ma Beatbox, or Nocturnal Emissions, a going concern to this day.

Published, designed, and produced by Ross Waitman and Amaya Productions in collaboration with the artist, ELECTRONIC RESISTANCE compiles mail-art, collages, assemblages, flyers, slides, video stills, ephemera, record and tape covers to present an arresting cross-section of the genre-sundering art Nigel Ayers created between 1980 and 1992. It features an introductory reflection from Ayers, as well as an essay entitled “Bleeding Images: Antipsychiatry, Death, and Mind Control” by art historian and critic Nicolas Ballet (Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), contextualizing Ayers’s work and extensive career.

https://www.amaya-productions.com/

L’Angleterre des années 1970 assiste à la naissance de groupes de musique industrielle qui participent à l’émergence d’une contre-culture opérant comme une plateforme d’échange entre les arts. Les productions visuelles des musiciens industriels, qui sont dans un premier temps des performers, révèlent un phénomène artistique global qui opère au croisement d’une multitude de médiums.

Ce phénomène se diffuse rapidement au Japon grâce aux travaux de l’artiste Akita Masami qui entretient, dès 1979, de nombreuses correspondances avec les figures emblématiques de cette scène. Les collages de l’artiste japonais ont pour ambition de diffuser à l’étranger les productions sonores de son projet Merzbow et révèlent une pratique singulière du Xerox art et du mail art. Les artistes industriels entretiennent un dialogue avec l’héritage de la modernité en détournant les œuvres des futuristes et des dadaïstes à l’instar de Merzbow qui se réfère à l’œuvre habitable de Kurt Schwitters constituée d'objets trouvés, le Merzbau. La comparaison des productions visuelles d’Akita Masami avec celles des artistes industriels européens se comprend également dans l’étude de l’avant-garde japonaise qui influence les images de Merzbow. Le réseau parallèle du groupe Mavo ainsi que les recherches de Gutai et du groupe Neo-Dada Organizers marquent un contraste avec les références propres à la culture visuelle industrielle occidentale. Se pencher sur les images d’Akita Masami, qui correspondait avec Shimamoto Shōzō, est donc une invitation à reconsidérer l’avant-garde japonaise.

Cette communication se propose d'étudier ces échanges artistiques qui révèlent, dans des contextes différents (Europe et Japon), des œuvres en marge des circuits institutionnels de l’art à travers des stratégies de recyclages des outils médiatiques et d’une presse pornographique. Ces permutations permettent de considérer des appropriations entre deux cultures différentes, qui présentent ici des thématiques similaires, à travers le réseau international d’une contre-culture industrielle.

Intervention dans le cadre de la XIIème édition de l’École de Printemps organisée par le RIFHA en partenariat avec l'INHA, Tokyo, 9-13 juin 2014.

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The 1970s England saw the birth of industrial music bands involved in the emergence of a counterculture which operates as a platform of exchange between the arts. The visual productions of industrial musicians, who are initially performers, reveal a global artistic phenomenon that operates at the intersection of a multitude of mediums.

This phenomenon is spreading quickly in Japan through the work of the Japanese artist Akita Masami who maintains, since 1979, many correspondences with the emblematic figures of the industrial scene. Collages by Akita Masami aim to spread abroad his sound productions under the name of Merzbow, and reveal a singular practice of Xerox art and mail art. Industrial artists maintain a dialogue with the legacy of modernity by hijacking the works of the Dadaists and the Futurists artists, like Merzbow who refers to the work of Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, which is composed with found objects. Comparing Akita Masami’s visual productions with the works of European industrial artists also includes studying the influences of Japanese avant-garde on the Merzbow’s images. The radical Japanese art group Mavo and the researches of Gutai and Neo-Dada Organizers define a contrast with references which are specific to the Western industrial visual culture. Studying the images of Akita Masami, who corresponded with Shimamoto Shozo, is an invitation to reconsider the Japanese avant-garde.

This paper will examine these artistic exchanges that reveal, in different contexts (Europe and Japan), visual works which participate in some recycling strategies of media tools and of pornographic media. These permutations allow to consider the appropriations between two different cultures which contain similar themes, through the international network of an industrial counterculture.

Industrial Activity: Kraftwerk's Radio-Activity as dystopian sonic template.
Radio-Activity (1975) deals with the most dystopian themes the pioneering German electronic group ever addressed. It was released shortly before the emergence in Britain of what became known as industrial music. The paper will argue that the more sonically radical and conceptually dystopian elements of the album were a strong precedent for industrial music and the way in which it used electronically-generated sound and noise. The minimalistic electronic percussion, oscillator and voltage sounds, shortwave radio recordings and collages of sampled voices deployed by Kraftwerk here can be directly compared to industrial's use of noise as a texture, within and against a pop format. The use of these sonic elements to explore dystopian and ambivalent subject matter is also relevant here. Geiger Counter manipulates the fears surrounding radiation and The Voice of Energy features an alienated, electronically processed vocal that gives voice to fears of technological domination. The use of simulated and actual radio sounds and news reports on News has parallels with the near-contemporary work of the British group Cabaret Voltaire and their use of similar materials and themes, for instance on the early track Baader Meinhof.  While Kraftwerk took this sample-based technique no further, it would become a key stylistic trope of industrial music. Uranium is a chilling soundscape that coldly dramatises the lethal potential of the element, and uses electronic sound to communicate a sense of ominousness. Another important parallel to be considered is the use of sonic and conceptual ambivalence. The album was the group's most controversial, with some seeing it as being uncritical of, or even consciously aestheticising nuclear power. This overlooked Kraftwerk's documentary ambition to present tone pictures of everyday technological life, as well as their sly irony. The presenation of extreme and disturbing subject matter in industrial has generated even more severe criticism, with many being disturbed by its sonic-conceptual ambivalence. With these questions in mind, Radio-Activity will be compared with examples from groups such as Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Clock DVA and others, illustrating some of the related approaches that appeared in the wake of the album. Both Kraftwerk and these artist consciously used what were then the still-alienating potentials of electronic sound,  manipulating and ambivalently exploring technophobia and the darker side of late 20th Century ideas of (post)-industrial progress. Due to the controversy generated by its apparent “over-identification” with nuclear power, it has been relatively overlooked and is seen as less influential than those before and after it, yet it did exert a hidden influence as what Slavoj Žižek terms as a “vanishing mediator” between the approaches informing the elektronische musik of the Cologne School (which Kraftwerk members were fully aware of) and industrial. From there the still under-narrated industrial's effect on subsequent forms including Electronic Body Music (EBM), New Beat, Techno and certain strains of electronica can be traced, expanding our understanding of Kraftwerk's stylistic and conceptual influence further than previously.

En este trabajo se plantea teóricamente la existencia de androcentrismo en los puestos de producción e ingeniería del sonido en la industria musical en los que se perpetúan los modelos estereotipados de distribución laboral, donde las mujeres desempeñan o son relegadas a roles feminizados y, principalmente, están alejadas de las posiciones que conllevan autoridad. Para ello, se ha analizado el estado de los estudios musicológicos en relación con los estudios de género y la crítica feminista, estudiando la interrelación de las mujeres con la industria musical y con la tecnología del sonido musical, examinando la representación de las mismas en diversos campos profesionales y observando la construcción de redes de trabajo de mujeres en el sonido. El análisis de estos estudios sugiere que las mujeres, que se desarrollan profesionalmente en el campo del tratamiento técnico del sonido en la industria musical, podrían dotar a su labor profesional de una nueva significación de género al cuestionar el capital social y los cánones establecidos.
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In this paper the existence of androcentrism is theoretically proposed in sound production and enginee-ring positions in the music industry in which stereotypical models of labor distribution are perpetuated, where women play or are relegated to feminized roles and, mainly, they are far from positions that carry authority. For this, the state of musicological studies in relation to gender studies and feminist criticism has been analyzed, studying the interrelation of women with the music industry and with the techno-logy of musical sound, examining their representation in various professional fields and observing the construction of women’s networks in sound. The analysis of these studies suggests that women, who develop professionally in the field of technical sound treatment in the music industry, could give their professional work a new gender significance by questioning social capital and established canons.

Hace ahora casi cuatro décadas que Throbbing Gristle hizo su aparición en la escena underground internacional como un estallido inesperado. Sin duda, también, inesperable. Un estallido electrónico, cuyas reverberaciones se prolongan hasta nuestros días. Surgidos del colectivo artístico COUM Transmissions, la banda dio nombre a la música industrial mediante la fundación de su propio sello discográfico Industrial Records en 1976. Desde aquellos años, ha adoptado formas y estilos diversos. Y, lo que parece aún más importante, sus miembros han sembrando un espíritu y una actitud renovados, propagando un modo más amplio de entender el arte de los sonidos, fundiéndolo a otras disciplinas e introduciendo cierta complejidad creativa a base de samples pre-grabados, sobresaltos y distorsiones. Este ensayo presenta a Throbbing Gristle como uno de los grandes motores no sólo de la música sino de la estética y el arte contemporáneo.

En este artículo se da cuenta de las tendencias que los músicos independientes mexicanos están llevando a cabo para enfrentar el impacto del paso de lo analógico a lo digital, así como de la distribución, promoción y comercialización de su música. Se revela un escenario ampliamente diverso en cuanto a creaciones, contenidos y modelos de negocio. En tanto los músicos son un eslabón imprescindible en la cadena de la industria del entretenimiento, es esencial comprender este sector y sus prácticas, de allí la necesidad de que la academia, las instituciones de gobierno, empresarios, industria musical y la sociedad en general, se impliquen en el debate para generar políticas públicas que abonen al mejor y más justo funcionamiento de este sector.

Exploring the Paradoxes of Industrial/Noise Music Worlds
Building on published research into noise scenes, specifically those associated with noise musics on the fringes of Flying Nun in New Zealand and the New York No Wave scene, and my current project that is a cross cultural mapping of the music scenes in Manchester and Porto Alegre, this paper will explore the worlds of noise music beyond locally specific music scenes. While noise and industrial musics have typically been excluded from considerations of world music, this is somewhat surprising considering the strong elements of exoticism and eclecticism, that can be found in the music of Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, for example, or more recently William Bennett’s Africa-noise project, not to mention the pioneering of independent modes of global distribution. This paper will argue that industrial noise musics are ‘world musics’ in a more fundamental sense, in that they investigate noise phenomena as essentially prior to stable sounds and significance, and are therefore concerned with world forming. This is both in the sense of how seemingly chaotic noise can be formed into specific soundworlds, and the ways in which this is expressive of specific, often post-industrial, environments. The worlds of industrial and noise music are therefore concerned with modes of environmentally situated world forming, even as they transcend identifiably geographical locations in unpredictable crossings of appropriated forms, styles and aesthetic procedures. This will be examined with reference to a range of examples highlighting the eclecticism of industrial musics including Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats and Cabaret Voltaire’s Red Mecca.

Introduction to the volume co-edited with Benjamin Halligan and Nicola Spelman on noise and contemporary music, crossing rock, psychedelia, postpunk, industurial, avant-classical and noise music proper, using a variety of conceptual approaches, and featuring  both academic and noise practitioner contributors.

"Sannicandro and Galloway uncover a fascinating aspect of the history of industrial and noise music in their case study of the band Fistfuck, composed of Diana Rogerson and Jill Westwood. Contemporaries of Coil and Nurse with Wound, Fistfuck have not been accorded the same respect in histories of these genres despite also doing groundbreaking work. Sannicandro and Galloway argue that there are a number of reasons for this; the very confronting nature of the use of BDSM imagery and practices on stage by the band; the diminution of their contribution because one of the band members, Diane Rogerson, was in a relationship with one of the members of Nurse with Wound; and the lack of recorded material by the band.  The authors argue, however, that it is this very lack of material that opens up space for more interesting readings of the band and the potentials of the music industry itself.  They consider how both noise and BDSM practices implicate the body in ways that mean capturing a performance for posterity in a meaningful form may not even be possible, and the potentialities hinted at in the tiny fragments of their work available to us may do more to open up queer spaces for thinking about bodies, trauma and gender.  This raises questions about how the history of the music industry is written around records that best suit its capitalist form." -Sarah Raine and Catherine Strong

Joy Division, relative to their Manchester Post-punk contemporaries have often been seen in proximity to industrial music, a perception reinforced by Genesis P-Orridge’s claims that Curtis was a Throbbing Gristle fan particularly appreciative of the former’s track “Weeping” from their DOA: Third and Final Report album. P-Orridge returned this fandom by referring directly to Ian Curtis in Psychick TV’s later track “I.C. Water” and reiterating their personal connection in several interviews and other texts. This paper will argue that beyond this purported connection between the two groups and individuals the resonances between Joy Division and industrial music run deeper in the ways both were haunted by post-industrial cityscapes, modernist literature (especially Ballard and Kafka but also the proto-modernist Gogol, author of Dead Souls) and especially a shared interest in Esotericism and the occult. In fact Joy Division’s track “Dead Souls” has less to do with Gogol’s satirical portrayal middle class corruption and spiritual ennui, than with being haunted by past lives, an abiding interest of the vocalist: “Someone take these dreams away/That point me to another day”. This paper will argue that more generally Joy Division were haunted by the ruins of modernism whether in the form of decaying urban environments, or literary modernism, in ways that correspond closely with the ways similar environments haunted industrial groups like Throbbing Gristle, and perhaps with greater proximity, Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire. In both cases, we are confronted by “missions of dead souls” (the title of the live album of TG’s final performance in 1980) with profound resonances.

Through a historical overview of industrial music, cultural movement emerged in the late 1970’s, this research elects some of the artists that worked with martial discourses in their lyrics, music, indumenta and graphic art, focusing on the Austrian band Nachtmahr. Founded by the former soldier Thomas Rainer, the solo project composes military metaphors in order to discuss quotidian themes related to general individuals, such as power relations, the defense of authenticity and the fight against hypocrisy. According to a phenomenological perspective, with some ethnographic observations, and an analysis of the cultural references of this music genre, we propose a reflection about the usage of totalitarian and military elements in industrial music.

Lexi's MA Thesis, "Bodies Bear Traces: Noise, Power and Perpetual Disintegration" is an in-depth analysis of the noise music scene's connection at levels of content, context and form with sadomasochism, as a sensational analysis of the body as a locus of power relations, first of all through the lens of Deleuzo-Nietzschean eternal recurrence and Foucauldian genealogy in discussion with Elizabeth Freeman's theories of queer temporality and historiography. As the paper progresses, it later ruminates on Foucault's statement in "Nietzsche/Genealogy/History" that "the body is a...volume in perpetual disintegration," whose poetical paradox of eternity and entropy echoes not only noise musician Romain Perrot AKA Vomir's "Harsh Noise Wall Manifesto," but also Michel Serres' continuation of information theory, and the "cosmic pessimism" and "demontology" of Eugene Thacker. Accordingly, the phusis of power causes us to reflect on the notion of governmentality in an ultimately ungovernable universe, and the ways in which haptic / corporeal engagement with as ungovernable an artistic force such as harsh noise may provide new sensational bodily responses to power's implementation on the subject.

Para realizar esta investigación, se procedió a investigar temas que nos permita facilitar el desarrollo de nuestra investigación. El primero de ellos el tema relacionado al Conocimiento y Ciencia, donde el conocimiento se divide en científico y empírico, la ciencia se divide en factuales y formales, para nuestra investigación se rige el conocimiento empírico y las ciencias factuales. La Tecnología, actualmente es muy importante para poder realizar, cualquier tipo de investigación donde las herramientas tecnológicas que se utilizará para poder facilitar la investigación son: el internet, laptops, Tablets, libros virtuales. Donde consta de una investigación cualitativa, debido a que se basó en la búsqueda de información de hecho teóricos que se registró en diferentes medios tecnológicos, desde cuándo se originó la industria musical hasta las causas por las cuales desapareció en el Ecuador. Para la presente investigación se utilizó métodos empíricos, ya que la información que se obtuvo, fue de reseñas que personas experimentaron o conocen sobre la industria musical del Ecuador en todo este lapso de tiempo, ya sean periodistas, críticos, músicos, empresarios musicales, etc. Para realizar el informe de investigación se utilizó las Normas APA 6, que nos permite tener un informe bien desarrollado para que los lectores no tengan inconvenientes al momento de leer y buscar la referencias de búsqueda de la información que se utilizó durante la investigación.

I examine the industrial/dark ambient band Coil’s London origins and their move to rural Somerset, focusing on their creation of sacred space via sound and their use of this space to re-imagine gay, pagan identity. Coil’s synthesis of Neopaganism, Thelema, and Austin Osman Spare’s Zos-Kia forged an occult aesthetic that, paradoxically-- as technologically sophisticated as their music was-- constituted an engagement with what critic Rob Young calls “the dual landscape/dreamscape of” rural Britain (Electric Eden 45). Coil “queered” British folk culture by melding it with urban magical and musical traditions, even as they helped bring occulture into the mainstream.

A short piece for general readership about the esoteric book collection of Jhonn Balance, member of the influential electronic group Coil.

This text is published as part of Barrington, Phil (ed.), 2015, "The Golden Age of Bloodsports: The Collected Words, Lyrics & Performed Songs of Jhonn Balance", Barrington Arts.

This article argues that far from being a marginal Black Metal subgenre, Industrial Black Metal is central in bringing out Black Metal’s often disavowed appropriation of machinic noise and its critique of machine society. Through its engagement with “becoming machine” logic and robot apocalypse, cybernetic, and cosmic science fictions, Industrial Black Metal reconfigures Black Metal’s drive toward the inorganic inhuman as vehement critique of capitalist modernity and the industrial death state.

This article considers the ways in which metal has interacted with the aesthetics of electronic music since the 1980s, from its earliest exchanges with hip hop through to recent developments in the djent subgenre. It highlights the persistence of metal’s practitioners in adopting new technologies (including samplers, drum machines and Digital Audio Workstations) and the challenges that this has brought to established ideas of conventional metal music practice. Underlying the discussion is the notion of the ‘code’, a familiar term in metal music studies, which has been employed to articulate ideas of metal’s core musical attributes. In these terms, electronic music’s creative practices can be seen to have facilitated both the deconstruction and re-contextualization of metal’s code, enabling the genre to be re-imagined and ultimately enriched.

In 1988, the Welsh theatre company Brith Gof entered a collaboration with the Industrial music collective Test Dept. to stage a performance based on Y Gododdin. Conceived as political theatre in the light of »Thatcherism« (Pearson/Shanks 2001), the production positioned itself far from romantic depictions, but deliberately used anachronistic features. Following an international tour, Test Dept./Brith Gof released an accompanying album, which – even devoid of the actual performance context – became a highly influential point of reference for the Industrial music scene and beyond.

My paper will examine notions and functions of Celtic immanent in Test Dept./Brith Gof’s Gododdin. Socio-historical and cultural contexts of the production will be discussed as well as contemporary academic opinions on northern British ethnic identities of the Early Historic period. By exploring this particular production and its framework, overall strategies in the »pop«-negotiation of Celtic historical narratives will be extrapolated.

References:
Test Dept./Brith Gof: Gododdin. Ministry of Power, 1989.
Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. 2001, Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge.

Culled from the private mostly unpublished archives of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, the 1st volume called "Archives and Documents" presents 152 full colour pages of crucial early art terrorism like h/er little seen Nekrophile zine, reproduced here in full. Nekrophile magazine was conceived in 1968 by GPO as a sole and only issue. The collages, drawings, poems and texts gathered in it deal with the themes that will prevail in the iconography of Industrial Music.
This volume also displays ultra rare TG and PTV documents commented by GPO and that are not the same old exponents that a Google image search will yield.(no ticket stubs or tape cover designs here).

Edited by Nicolas Ballet with personal explanations and insights added by GPO, this volume is an essential visual document of Gen’s contributions to art and culture from the mid 1960s onwards with a strong emphasis on that most controversial and rewarding period of the late 70s and early 80s.

The second book (Prophecies & Messages) focuses on even more personal and magickal aspects that are the very heart of GPO’s life and art, it contains the reproduction of two magical and richly illustrated scrapbooks selected by Nicolas Ballet.
Unparalleled documents of a virtual spiritual journey into he/r occult practices, essential for students of contemporary esotericism.

These books are an indispensible gift for the industrial music fan, the connoisseur of 20th and 21st century art and the novice and experts of the byways of the occult, prepared with the full collaboration of and overseen by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, it is futile to stress that this no less than a visual companion piece to the Psychick Bible.

Edited by Nicolas Ballet
Designed by Valnoir
Published by Timeless Ed.
2018 - France

« Un État totalitaire vraiment “efficient” serait celui dans lequel le tout-puissant comité exécutif des chefs politiques et leur armée de directeurs auraient la haute main sur une population d’esclaves qu’il serait inutile de contraindre, parce qu’ils auraient l’amour de leur servitude. » (Aldous Huxley)

A critical commentary that presents and contextualizes a film and video making practice spanning three decades. It locates a contemporary visual music practice within current and emerging critical and theoretical contexts and tracks back the history of this practice to the author’s initial screenings of work as part of the 1980’s British Scratch video art movement.

At the heart of the body of work presented here is an exploration and examination of methods and working practices in the encounter of music, sound and moving image.
Central to this is an examination of the affective levels that sound and image can operate on, in a transsensorial fusion, and political and cultural applications of such encounters, whilst examining  the epistemological regimes such work operates in.

A combination of factors has meant that work such as this, arising in the UK provinces, can fall below the historicizing and critical radar – these include the ephemeral and transitory nature of live performance work; the difficulties of documenting such work; the fragility and degeneration of emerging and quickly obsolescent formats; and a predominance of a London–centric focus on curating, screening and historicizing of experimental film and video art practices.

The author's film and video practice has been screened nationally and internationally over three decades, and has been recognized as exemplary practice both in the early 1980s at the inception of the Scratch movement and in more recent retrospectives. The critical commentary argues that this work contributes new knowledge of the history, contexts and practices of film and video art and audiovisual and visual music practices.

This essay examines the influence of Situationist thought on aesthetics in postwar Britain through a close analysis of Throbbing Gristle, a fine-arts-cum-pop group responsible for the invention of the dystopian subculture Industrial Culture. Framing the group's work as a response to the politics of 1970s Social Art, the article argues that Throbbing Gristle's techno-libertarian aesthetics represent a deliberate effort to foreground and maintain deep-seated contradictions within the concept of the art of everyday life. By emphasizing the aesthetic side of Situationist thought, the article also offers a new framework for understanding and interrogating the legacy of the Situationists after 1968.

[fr] La thèse réunit cinq travaux portant sur le rôle joué par la fiction dans notre expérience et notre appréhension du monde. La fiction peut-elle véhiculer des contenus de savoir ou constituer en elle-même une source de connaissance ? Cette interrogation est déclinée à travers une série d’études portant sur la sociologie implicite de l’écrivain américain William S. Burroughs ; les musiques industrielles comme dispositifs critiques ; le pouvoir configurateur de 1984 dans la dénonciation des nouvelles technologies de surveillance et de contrôle social ; l’homologie profonde entre pouvoir et narrativité ; ou encore les contre-fictions dans les "sociétés de contrôle". L’introduction générale qui précède ces travaux s’attache à construire deux exemples de "formes fictionnelles d’intelligibilité" conçues comme ressources cognitives et pragmatiques utilisées par les personnes : le "simulacre", qui consiste en la critique originale d’une cible, sur un mode systématiquement ironique, de manière à retourner contre elle son langage et son mode de fonctionnement ; le "futur antérieur", qui propose l’anticipation d’une menace décrite comme déjà advenue, de manière à montrer l’urgence d’une action à entreprendre pour la conjurer. La thèse défend une conception minimaliste et holiste de la connaissance fictionnelle : c’est en tant que moyen au service de la modélisation mimétique de processus politiques et sociaux que la fiction, en activant notre sens du possible, exerce une fonction cognitive. Ces travaux dégagent ainsi les premiers éléments d’un programme de recherche en sciences politiques et sociales autour du pouvoir du et comme récit. Le récit apparaît non seulement comme un objet, mais surtout comme un "analyseur" du politique.
[en] The thesis assembles five publications dealing with the role played by fiction in our experience and apprehension of the world. Can fiction convey contents of knowledge or even constitute a source of knowledge in itself? This question is broken down into a series of studies about the implicit sociology of American writer William S. Burroughs; industrial music as a critical device; the configuration power of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the denunciation of new technologies of surveillance and social control; the deep homology between power and narrativity; as well as counter-fiction within “societies of control”. The general introduction preceding these publications aims at building two examples of “fictional forms of intelligibility” conceived as cognitive and pragmatic resources used by members of society: “simulacrum”, which consists in criticising a target, in a systematically ironical mode, so as to turn its language and mode of functioning against it; “future perfect”, which proposes the anticipation of a threat described as having already occurred, in order to demonstrate the urgency in taking action to thwart it. The thesis defends a minimalist and holist conception of fictional knowledge: it is as a means at the service of the mimetic modelling of social and political processes that fiction activates a sense of possibilities and exerts a cognitive function. In this way, these collected works intend to give the first elements of a research programme in social and political sciences around power of and as a narrative. Narrative appears not only as an object, but especially as a tool for analyzing politics.

Problematika významu progresívnej hudobnej kultúry so zameraním na psychedelický rock a kraut-rock v rámci tzv. kontrakultúry je vo vedeckej monografii reflektovaná z viacerých interdisciplinárnych, kulturologických a filozoficko-estetických hľadísk – skúma vzájomné vzťahy a prieniky hudby, životného štýlu s filozofiou, resp. svetonázorom a politickými východiskami kontrakultúry daného obdobia. Odborná reflexia témy sa pohybuje od uchopenia kontrakultúrnych fenoménov vo všeobecnosti až po jej konkrétne prejavy v tzv. kraut-rockovej subkultúre vo vtedajšej Nemeckej spolkovej republike (v komparácii so situáciou vo svete).

Le courant des musiques industrielles révèle, dès le milieu des années 1970 et tout au long des années 1980, une culture visuelle globale croisant différents médias dans un dialogue étroit avec l’héritage de la modernité. Certains groupes industriels mettent en scène une esthétique fascisante dans leurs œuvres, prenant comme repère l’histoire des régimes autoritaires, en particulier celui du Troisième Reich, afin d’interroger la façon dont les mass media de leur époque incarnent une forme de totalitarisme dissimulé. La diffusion de ces images auprès d’un public éclectique permet cependant à une scène politique d’extrême droite d’instrumentaliser ce mouvement artistique.

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England in the 1970s and the 1980s witnessed the emergence of industrial music bands involved in a counterculture that operated as a platform of exchange between the arts. Some industrial musicians became aware of the rise of mass media and of the new kinds of power that followed an ability to manipulate crowds. These artists used a subversive iconography in their visual productions in order to reveal a form of implicit totalitarianism generated by the power of information. However, the diffusion of these images among a large audience are instrumentalized by some right-wing parties and nationalists trends.

Recycled, re-engineered and transformed pornography has often been appropriated by many of the industrial music movement’s female personalities who are invested in an anti-censorship discourse. This contrasts with the dominant form of feminism in the 1970s, which railed against the depiction of all aspects of sexuality. Artists Cosey Fanni Tutti, Lisa Carver, Diamanda Galás, Mïrka Lugosi, Antal Nemeth, Diana Rogerson and Jill Westwood challenged the codes of male domination by reconfiguring gender and overturning the violence perpetrated by men within the industrial movement. Following the artistic and cultural context of the 1970s and 1980s, such issues gave rise to the radical performances that are discussed throughout this article.

This paper examines the leading role played by the American mechanical performance group Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) within the field of machine art during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and as organized under the headings of (a) destruction/survival; (b) the cyborg as a symbol of human/machine interpenetration; and (c) biomechanical sexuality. As a manifestation of the era’s “industrial” culture, moreover, the work of SRL artists Mark Pauline and Eric Werner was often conceived in collaboration with industrial musicians like Monte Cazazza and Graeme Revell, and all of whom shared a common interest in the same influences. One such influence was the novel Crash! by English author J. G. Ballard, and which in turn revealed the ultimate direction in which all of these artists sensed society to be heading: towards a world in which sex itself has fallen under the mechanical demiurge.

Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism and François Laruelle’s non-standard philosophy (or non-philosophy) have demonstrated that materialism is yet another project determined transcendentally rather than realistically. In other words, materialism is not determined in the last instance by matter or the real immanently affecting the idea of “matter,” but rather by a philosophical doctrine of materialism and matter. (In this sense, Laruelle builds on Marx's critique of philosophical materialism of the era of the Young Hegelians, whereas Meillassoux indirectly contributes to the same discussion via Kant.) Eliminative materialism is yet another philosophy about matter and materialism, a theory relying on the philosophical presumptions that matter is in the last instance situated in biology and on the purely philosophical decision that materialism equals realism. The equation materialism=realism
pretends to have always already established the site of truth and appointed itself as the supreme guardian of that truth. My claim is that in order to radicalize materialism we ought to resort to the realism of non-standard philosophy, a term more or less synonymous with what Laruelle formerly called “non-philosophy.” Both terms refer to a theoretical position that enables use of philosophical material in a way
determined not by any doctrine but instead by what Laruelle calls “the syntax of the real.” The procedure of realist thinking is one that follows the “syntax of the real,” a procedure Laruelle terms cloning.

The chance to interview Blixa Bargeld comes but once in a lifetime. As leader of German industrial rock pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten, his uncompromising reputation has often preceded him. Known as a precarious interview subject, Herr Bargeld’s contempt of music journalism is now the stuff of legend. Skyping from his home in Berlin, Blixa soon alleviates any feelings of trepidation, speaking candidly about Neubauten’s first Australian tour in some 20 years, using turbines as instruments and why he really left the Bad Seeds.