A Sonic Fiction of Boring Dystopia. Macon Ashford Bannon Holt. CENTRE FOR CULTURAL STUDIES, GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON. Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in Cultural Studies. 2017 !1 Declaration. I declare the following thesis to be my own work. Where the works of others have been used they are cited and referenced in the bibliography. Any assistance from others has been listed in the acknowledgements. Candidate Name: Macon Holt, Student Number: 33254455. Date: 01/08/17 Candidate Signature: !2 Acknowledgements. This thesis has caused me to not make a great deal of sense for a great deal of time and getting through that would not have been possible without the help of many other people and institutions. I would like to thank my supervisors Dr. Mark Fisher and Dr. Anamik Saha, for their guidance and expertise and reminding me that what I had to hand-in had to be vaguely “Ph.D. shaped”. That said, their encouragement of me to explore the odd terrain that this thesis churned up was vital for me in completing it. I would also like to thank the Centre for Cultural Studies for providing a space in which what is “Ph.D. shaped” can be challenged and explored. In particular, I would like to thank the convener of the Ph.D. program, Dr. Luciana Parisi, whose course, “Critical Theory of Interactive Media”, has changed the way that I think about pretty much everything. To this day I’m not sure I have caught up to where it sent my thoughts. I would like to thank Ark Books of Copenhagen for giving me a welcoming place of camaraderie when writing alone in my own cave became an insurmountable task. I would like to thank my parents, Duncan Holt and Fiona Bannon, for their unceasing support and showing me, by example, that this kind of undertaking is something possible. A note of gratitude for my brother Lewys, whose patience with me as I pontificated over the years is to be commended. And as engaged audience and critic, he helped me grow my confidence to where I felt able to wax on for 200 odd pages. That said, he is an inspiration in his own right. Finally, I would like to thank Katrine Pram Nielsen for her immeasurable support and inspiration. If this thesis were to be dedicated to anyone, if theses received dedications, this one would be to her. In the months following the initial hand-in of this thesis Mark Fisher took his own life. This tragedy was a great shock to me and his friends and family, one from which we are all still reeling. Mark and his work had been a major inspiration and influence throughout this project, as he was to thousands of others across the world. With the help of Anamik and my examiners Dr. Ayesha Hameed and Prof. Holger Schulze, who picked up on some of the underdeveloped influence of Mark in this thesis, I have been able to transform it into some thing that I hope can honour the legacy of his thought, scholarship and activism. !3 Abstract. This thesis attempts to re-engage the practice of Sonic Fiction devised by Kodwo Eshun, within the historical context that Mark Fisher termed, boring dystopia, and produce A Sonic Fiction of Boring Dystopia. This also shows how the practice of sonic fiction might intercede to overcome an impasse between a traditional critical theory (Adorno) and Deleuzian approaches to the analysis of popular music. The thesis is in two parts; the first provides an overview of the concept of boring dystopia and the practice of sonic fiction. The second is A Sonic Fiction of Boring Dystopia, that performs an experimental exploration of the practice sonic fiction set across five concepts; Attention, Complicity, Catharsis, Home and Conjunction, three chapters that reconceptualize the works of David Foster Wallace, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, and Theodor Adorno as theory-fictions and sonic fictions, and 6 experiential fictionalized accounts of musical experience. This is followed by the conclusion of the thesis. By developing these tools it is argued that we can chart a ‘line of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2013b: 13) to overcome the impasse that inhibits our thinking about the emancipatory potential of popular music. To help us move beyond the rigid pessimism of critical theory and the sometimes apolitical optimism of the Deleuzian approach. Thus allowing us to discover new territory, which the present paradigm may also afford. !4 Contents. Declaration. -------------------------------------------------------------2 Acknowledgements. ---------------------------------------------------3 Abstract. -----------------------------------------------------------------4 Contents. ----------------------------------------------------------------5 Introduction. ------------------------------------------------------------6 POP MUSIC IN BORING DYSTOPIA. -----------------------------------------12 ON SONIC FICTION. -----------------------------------------------------------31 A SONIC FICTION METHODOLOGY. -----------------------------------------47 A Sonic Fiction of Boring Dystopia. ---------------------------------53 A Science Fiction: Wallace. .................................................................54 Jessie J at the closing of the 2012 London Olympics. ______________64 ATTENTION. --------------------------------------------------------------------67 Busking on the London Underground. ___________________________91 COMPLICITY. -------------------------------------------------------------------94 A Theory-Fiction: Deleuze and Guattari. .................................................114 On “Bored in the USA” On Letterman On YouTube. ______________125 CATHARSIS. --------------------------------------------------------------------129 The Stones. ________________________________________________150 HOME. --------------------------------------------------------------------------153 A Sonic Fiction: Adorno. ....................................................................171 One of Two: Carly Simon’s New Boyfriend. _____________________182 CONJUNCTION.---------------------------------------------------------------- 185 Two of Two: On Xiu Xiu and Mixing. ___________________________203 Conclusion. --------------------------------------------------------------207 Appendix. ---------------------------------------------------------------214 SUMMARY OF INFINITE JEST. -----------------------------------------------214 Bibliography. ------------------------------------------------------------218 !5 Introduction. This thesis attempts two distinct but related tasks. The first is an extended and applied exploration of the practice of sonic fiction to produce a sonic fiction of boring dystopia to illustrate how this methodology can produce knowledge. The second is the subject to which the sonic fictional method is applied; the critical impasse of debates that surround the intersection between popular music, capitalism and subjectivity. To address the second task first, these debates appear to operate, on the left, between two polarities of contention that could be called the Adornian perspective and Deleuzian perspective. The Adornian perspective is based on the work of Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno and presents popular music as a field that is necessarily a field of oppression, resulting from music's adoption of the commodity form, with numerous and complex consequences. The Deleuzian perspective, on the other hand, sees potential, in some of the formal developments of popular music, to create liberating inter-subjective spaces that can break down barriers between self and other through the immanent experience of sound. Thus such experiences can potentially rupture the individualized structures on which liberal capitalism is founded. Whilst both perspectives arguably persist in various forms they belong more properly to particular historical paradigms. The Adornian point of view requires that the culture industry appears to operate more as a monolith than it appears today. This appearance was already beginning to change at the time of Adorno’s death in the late 1960s, with the rise of the counterculture, which required, diversification on the part of the industry to provide for increasingly individualistic consumers. Likewise, the Deleuzian perspective was engaged with by critics at the end of the Twentieth Century and beginning of the 21st, when the rising popularity of club culture, and its relationship to non-semantic music and drugs that engendered empathetic experiences, seemed to open up a new revolutionary space. This period was also the moment when the practice of sonic fiction emerged as a way to traverse the impasses imposed by theory and music up to this point. The work of Kodwo Eshun in More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998), was both a response to and move beyond what had become stale conventions of music writing. Those being types of music writing which fell into one of two camps; academic theorization, which reduced the experience of music to easily comprehensible theory/ frameworks, perfect for conference debate but devoid of excitement; and music journalism that could only discuss the semantic content of songs, reducing everything else to the claim that music could speak for itself. Eshun had respect for both fields, if not their moves to assert dominance, and he sought to use the tools of each to move beyond practices that attempted to reduce the experience of music to the constraints of writing, and instead produced writing that could intensify the experience of music. !6 This project is very much one of the Deleuzian paradigm and most of