James Coleman
Music
"Infection Apparatus" (LP, 2018)
- Available on cassette from the Dupe Shop, Toronto:
-- Demo tracks here.
-- A little explanation of the title:
"The perfect apparatus, it seems to me, is the HIGHWAY. In it maximum circulation coincides with maximum control. Nothing moves that isn't both incontestably "free" and strictly classified, identified, individuated in exhaustive files of digitized registrations. A network endowed with its own fueling stations, its own police, its autonomous, neutral, empty, and abstract spaces, the highway system perfectly represents the territory, as if laid out in bands over the land, a heterotopia, the cybernetic heterotopia. Everything has been carefully parameterized so that nothing happens, ever. The undifferentiated daily flow is punctuated only by the statistical, foreseen, and foreseeable series of accidents, about which THEY keep us all the better informed as we never see them with our own eyes-accidents which are not experienced as events, as deaths, but as a passing disruption whose every trace is erased within the hour. In any case, THEY die a lot less on state highways than on the interstates, as the DOT reminds us. And it is hardly as if the flattened animals, noticed only in the slight swerve they induce in passing cars, remind us what it means to LIVE WHERE OTHERS PASS. No atom of the molecularized flow, none of the impervious monads of the apparatus needs us to remind it that it should get moving. The highway system was made - with its wide turns, its calculated, signalized uniformely - solely in order to merge all types of behavior into a single one: the non-surprise, sensible and smooth, consistently steered toward a destination, the whole traveled at an average and speed. Still, the slight sense of absence, spanning the distance from end to end, as if one could stay in an apparatus only if struck by the prospect of getting out, without ever having really been in it, been there. In end, the pure space of the highway captures the abstraction of all place more than of all distance. Nowhere have THEY so perfectly substituted places with names through their nominalist reduction. Nowhere is separation so mobile, so convincing, and armed with a vocabulary, road signs, less apt to subversion. Thus the highway: the concrete utopia of cybernetic Empire. And to think some have heard of the "information superhighway" without sensing the total police surveillance to come."
Tiqqun – “A critical metaphysics could emerge as a science of apparatuses”