Stop Making Sense: Fuck 'em and Their Law (... It's Only I and O but I Like It...)

Indeed, you may find that these things are all rather silly. But logic is always a bit silly. If one does not go to the root of the childish, one is inevitably precipitated into stupidity, as can be shown by innumerable examples...

—Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts209

Techno Music has generally been approached either from the perspective of the artists involved, or in connection with drug (ab)use, or with respect to the politics of rave culture.[1] By framing the issues differently, this paper aims to position Techno in closer relation to literature, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralist philosophy. As a kind of “theoretical background-noise,” I have sampled Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze/Guattari, because they—much like Techno itself—are concerned with the limits of subject, author, and representation. However, I do not want authoritatively to prescribe a proper way of reading. Readers are welcome to proceed by associations or to otherwise make productive use of the interstices among these references. Thus, drawing from various discourses, this paper itself partakes in Techno’s strategy of sampling, of putting heterogeneous elements into a new context. The tracks I have included are mostly from the Techno/Dance Act The Prodigy, whose album Music For The Jilted Generationshall serve as a kubernetes,as a steering device providing thematic anchoring points in what follows. One might argue that such an analysis of Techno would yield better insights if it focused on a more underground Techno artist, one that has not already become a staple of MTV. But, as I hope to make clearer, I have chosen The Prodigy precisely because their album marks the precarious position on the cusp between what’s still underground and what’s already commercial, between “enacting the ineffable” and “making sense.”

So, I’ve decided to take my work back underground, to stop it falling into the wrong hands...

(The Prodigy, “Intro”)

The Prodigy, “Intro,” Music for the Jilted Generation.

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Apart from evoking (at least to my mind) a strangely familiar William-S.-Burroughs-feeling, these words—taken from the “Intro” track of The Prodigy’s Music For The Jilted Generation—address two issues that will figure importantly in my reading of the phenomenon “Techno.” First, they evoke the prominent sound-metaphor of modernism, the typewriter, and thereby relate Techno to the realm of writing, the realm of the text, of differentiality as opposed to the presence of the voice. Second, the passage opens up the question of the differentiation of underground and official culture, of the political relevance of Techno—in short, of the position of Techno music as an art form in relation to society as a system of regulations.

Rock ‘n’ Roll culture has always defined itself in terms of phallic sex and:or deviance (to the law, to the common sense and its aesthetics). The last two decades have witnessed a decisive shift, and I will shortly contrast what I consider two of the main traits within mainstream music culture. On the one hand, although the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Elvis Presley) and his smudgy, deviant but true heirs (Sid Vicious/Johnny Thunders) have died, the revival of both Rock ‘n’ Roll and The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle nevertheless goes on and on. In contrast to Rock, Hip-Hop or Rap do not have an ideal (freedom/peace/love&sex) as either starting or terminal point, an ideal that even in its impossibility might serve as “authentic” music’s signified (e.g., the suicide of Kurt Cobain). They start from the fact of ghetto (tribe), digitalisation, segregation, a situation that mightchange for the better, but also—more likely—for the worse. Nevertheless, the discourses of Hip-Hop and Rap still operate on the level of the outspoken signified, on the level of the message, of lyrics ²(preferably “explicit” and labeled with a Parental Advisory). Though their...