“REacting shows a lack of control, an inability to stay cool/clearheaded under pressure. Pwen songs push the point in a way that circumvents the need for reaction.” – Houngan Matt
A recent twitter spat between Robin Mackay (Urbanomic) and Nick Land over at Outside/In has prompted me to write a second ‘In the Blood’ post.
On the surface the exchange is about whether there might be genetic factors determining the quality of electronic music created by certain races. It began with Nick’s suggestion that contemporary accelerationism would benefit from a ‘new pulse of darkside electronic music’ that, in his ‘hardcore racist’ opinion, would most likely come from the Black Atlantic. Robin’s surprised reaction to Nick’s claim that no such thing could come out of China prompted Nick to ask if this was because ‘the notion of overwhelming racial patterns in compulsive rhythmo-memetics is so obviously implausible?’ To Robin’s response ‘“Natural Rhythm” Omg, Omg, Omg’, Nick’s ‘Less-Evil’ twin shaded “Is “omg omg omg” supposed to be some kind of exhibition of natural rhythm?” After Robin’s fruitless search for any darkside, cyber-apocalyptic electronic music coming out of China, Nick duly noted that he’d perhaps been “Pwned by DNA”.
Now in Haitian folklore the word pwen has multiple cultural meanings and inflections. Derived from the Kreyol for “point”, it is specifically associated with the communication of meaning and the special “charge” of the mystères in Vodou song and ceremony. To be “pwened’ then, is to have pointed contact with energies of the loa (Vodou spirits). A pwen is a first brush with the loa that precedes full possession. It also means, in popular parlance, to be hexed, and, appropriately, given the conversation above, to be insulted (as in the contemporary ‘pwn’, on-line, gamer “elite-speak” for being defeated in a computer game, or “owned”).
Which brings me, somewhat circuitously, to the recent ‘Communities in Conversation’ event hosted by the Konsthalle C in Hökaränge suburb of Stockholm. The event included presentations from various people who had been involved in the Ghetto Biennale, including Leah Gordon, Roberto N. Peyre, André Eugène and Jean Claude Saintilus. I presented, in diagram form, the basic schema for the current chapter of Undead Uprising, based loosely upon Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which attempts to describe and account for the bifurcation of the zombie complex around 1968, mentioned in this previous post. I had hoped that a public presentation might help me break the conceptual bottleneck I seemed to be stuck in. This post is a second shot at that.
Invisible Mirrors 