Music has more or less been structured around the same pillars— melody, harmony, and rhythm as it’s traditionally conceived— for at least eight centuries, since the Notre Dame school of Léonin and Perotin initially and simultaneously aligned polyphony, rhythmic modes, and near-modern notation under what was later dubbed the ars antiqua. However, music is on the brink of a culture-wide transformation. These pillars will soon be equalled or overtaken by a host of other categories and relationships imagined by experimental musicians of recent centuries and made possible and popularly instinctual by the recording, synthesis, and digital manipulation of sound. The Universal Research Group is holding a working group on these near-future musics, following a programme roughly and accessibly outline in the introduction below, written over a decade ago. The first session will be on “Music Beyond Sound” (notes below).

To join or find out more contact us here.

Grey Papers:
Introduction: Near-Future Musics (from 2006)
Stub: Music Beyond Sound

Assembly on:
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

Brandon Avery Joyce and Stefan Siegel
@navel.la
Spring 2019

Some of you may have preconceptions about Theodor Adorno: a little bitter if not snooty, impossibly thick prose, a staunch defender of modernism, something-something about domination and the culture industry— and the reputation is partly deserved. I get it. However, don’t let this stop you from dipping into his greatest work, the Aesthetic Theory. It’s not only his greatest work, but in my opinion, our greatest work of aesthetics, and the one most badly needed in contemporary life and culture. Adorno is, above all, a champion for uncooperative, truthful, “emphatic,” autonomous cultural production. “Autonomy” here does not mean hermetic separation from the forces, institutions, or power structures that might compromise a work, as it was sometimes interpreted in the 20th century. Quite the opposite. Great works create autonomy out of their very struggles and engagement with those forces, institutions, and power structures, and in so doing, prefigure emancipation for us in the wider world. For Adorno, “every work is a forcefield” which negotiates without resolving or escaping the contradictions of modern life, the contradictions between the demands of form, content, subject, object, construction, expression, historical conditions, productive forces, social systems, genre, cliché, pleasure, expectation, boredom, aesthetic taboos, success, failure, beauty, ugliness— even what Adorno calls the “immanent necessity” of the work itself. What’s important is how a work negotiates these tensions, and whether it does so boldly and truthfully. What’s really not important is whether you or anyone else “likes” the work, whether it brings glory or fortune to its makers, or whether the work satisfies some pretedetermined aim or function of art and culture. Culture is not here to satisfy, flatter or fit into the world as it is, but to negate it and fight to bring another one into being, even if only as a glimmer.

This Assembly on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory— to be held this spring at Navel, if selected— is not so much going to be about Adorno or even Aesthetic Theory, nor is it going to be a reading group (we’re not delusional: the book is pretty long and slow-going). Instead, it’s going to be about a critical, dialectical way of thinking about culture and cultural production. Rather than reading the book from cover to cover, we’ll take short passages and tease out how some of the big ideas— “truth content,” “mimesis,” “immanent necessity”— all work or grind together dialectically. Most importantly, we’re going to make the case for Adorno’s relevance, by thinking through these passages in relation to current cultural forms and practices of all sorts. Participants of the assembly can contribute their own texts or projects to the cause, help out by reviewing, editing, or giving feedback on texts or projects, or just breeze through out of curiosity. I’ll also be using this assembly as an opportunity to resuscitate my campaign to get Adorno a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (more details here and to follow).

To join or find out more contact us here.
Project PDF

This page is for a relatively brief (only a few sessions) working group on the topic of “astropower”— that is, on social power and outer space. The focus will be more on emerging configurations of power and the social and political categories we may use to describe them, rather than on anything specifically or scientifically about outer space per se. This summer, there will be IRL sessions in Berlin at Trust and URL sessions online, likely in conjunction with The Future Left.

This is not so much a reading group, primarily because the big critical texts on the “Second Space Age” are scattershot or forthcoming, and most of us are starting from various levels of ignorance (including many of the people actively involved in the industry itself). Instead, we’ll be working from shorter texts and articles, listed below from less-to-greater thickness, and asking ourselves the following questions:

What will the extension of humanity into space do to terrestrial configurations of power?
How might governance, property, and law in space work differently (or not work at all)?
What would it really take to democratically mediate this transition, in order that it might really be for the benefit of humanity?
How are we going to get, or currently getting, screwed?

Minimum Reading (very short):

Article: “The final frontier – 21st century space race”
Article: “The rocketing significance of space”
INFO-PDF: “Main trends and challenges in the space sector”

Extra Credit:
(Recommended) Examining Outer Space Utopias of Silicon Valley: “Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Techno-Optimism”
Critical Article on the billionaire space race: “Why Billionaires in Space are not Going to Make the World a Better Place”
On Luxembourg and the Space Economy: “The Luxembourg Space Agency: Enabling the In-Space Economy”
The Outer Space Treaty of 1966: “The Outer Space Treaty of 1966”

Deeper Reading/Viewing:
Video: Kosmos Law
Carl Schmitt’s Shorter Land and Sea
And his much longer, and much denser, The Nomos of the Earth
Everett Dolman’s Astropolitik
The “Astrosociology” Virtual Library My opening notes on Astropower:
Astropower Notes 1
Astropower Notes 2

No one can claim mastery over the topic of power. No one’s an expert— not even the experts. We are all pretty much stumped. This friend seminar, or “freminar,”” is a group effort to unstump ourselves as best we can, and everybody has their own insights to contribute. The seminar notes, running about 200 pages so far, and stiltedly and plainly written, are mine. They consist of two broad parts. The first part gives a rough sketch of the metaphysical or philosophical evasion of power. The second part is an equally tentative overview of how I think this evasion hobbled our conception of power in social thought and action. So the first part dwells more on metaphysical, categorical, and even naturalistic questions; the second on the more sociological, cultural, and political. It’s not necessary to have read the cited thinkers, but I have the pdfs available in case you get the desire for further reading.
Sessions will be both IRL and URL

Notes:
Part 1, Section 1, on Pandynamism and the Meaning of Power.
Part 1, Section 2, on the Science of Accidents.
Plate 1: Rube Goldberg’s “Idea for Dodging Bill Collectors.”
Part 1, Section 3, Modes and Configurations.
Part 1, Section 4, The Investigator.
Part 1, Section 5, the Ontology of Mechanism, Time, and Rhythm.
Part 1, Section 6, Infinite Plasticity, Time, Space, and Alien Dynamics
Plate 2: Six Flags, Music, Bodies, and Machines.