Csaba Toth, History Department, Carlow College
RETHINKING THE POLITICS OF THE EAR: JAPAN'S SONIC UNDERGROUND
Abstract

A quarter of a century ago French cultural theorist Jacques Attali offered
some pivotal insights into the emancipatory potential of noise.  Attali
envisioned a new, post-capitalist order, the order of Composition, which
would be marked by the uncontrolled proliferation of noise (carnivals with
unpredictable outcomes and a "new mutation" in emancipatory technology
enhancing individual power), idleness, excess exchange value cum surplus
expenditure without accumulation, private pleasure, the illegitimate
recomposition of use value produced in the exchanges between bodies through
the work of noise, and the merger of consumer and producer.

Contemporary sound producers provide extraordinary evidence of the
tendencies that Attali anticipated to emerge.  Sound artists and noise
groups form a global cultural force capable of mobilizing diverse
constituencies.   Perhaps no country has a more vibrant sonic underground
than Japan.  Japanese noise provides a radical deconstruction of the status
of artist, audience, and music. It is the "music" of disappearance, a
refusal of representation, a refusal of identity.  A closer examination of
Japan's sonic underground also reveals how histories of industrialized
nations relate to one another and what the commonalities of trajectories
are, say, between the U. S. and Japan.

In my research, I distinguish between several interrelated waves in the
history of sound and noise production.  Noise formations in the early
1980s--most famously, San Francisco's The Residents, Berlin's Einsturzende
Neubauten, and TG (London) initially rejected repetitive modes of
technology, considered themselves sub-electronic, and, coextensively,
deployed sound found in a post-industrial environment as well as the body
as their chief sources of noise.  Following this brief examination of the
origins of contemporary sound culture, my talk will focus on the reception
of noise in Japan by performers such as Merzbow and Hijo Kaidan, the
Incapacitants and Hanatarashi who shaped the transition to a second-wave in
noise performance emerging in Tokyo and Osaka at the end of the 1980s.
These sound cultural practitioners embraced power electronics and
electronic media.  I will also map a third wave of sound that include
Masonna (from Osaka), the all-female Mne-mic (from Kamakura) and Boris
(Tokyo) in Japan.  These artists explore the utopian possibilities (and
dystopian constraints) along the interface between body 
configurations/organic materials and old as well as state of the art
technologies.  My exploration of sonic politics will end with a brief
overview of the current, digital stage that witnessed the rise of the
Powerbook Underground (Merzbow, id, Sensorband, etc.).

Aided by on-field research in Japan, extensive fan surveys, and tools of
cultural theory, I will consider whether this sonic underground's cultural
strategies might lead to the disappearance of codes and a re-arrangement of
the relations of consumption-production and pleasure and discuss the
lessons that this politics of the ear in Japan (and in the U. S.) may
entail for a (post)contemporary materialist praxis.

Snail and Email Addresses:
Csaba Toth
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of History
Carlow College
3333 Fifth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Ph: 412-361-7294 (home)
Email: ctoth@pitt.edu