bona futura

“I don't know whether I discovered some truth about myself, or whether something inside me grated for a moment, like a hidden joint where everything is soft. There, in that place, something suddenly shifted. I called yesterday because... well, what's the point of starting all over again? You should have picked up. Back then I knew what I wanted to say, and what, in fact, had changed.”

 

I always wanted to save my soul, and it wasn't always well planned. Sometimes I thought I first had to give myself a soul, then take it away, and only then begin to understand any of it.

The conviction that I had to pass through the eye of the needle in order to attain it made the goal precede the effort — though it was never the effort itself that mattered — the effort that was meant to rename everything.

What I was supposed to lose, though there was never any certainty that I possessed it in the first place, filled me with unease. The future loss of privilege organized my present. The loss of a promise that no one will ever fulfill. Every part of me, large and small, wanted to take to the streets and set a police station on fire.

And then... what then?

 

I'd probably dissolve into the crowd that I am, before and after—perhaps always the same, only slightly rearranged. I honestly don't know, because it would be like trying to arrange drops of water back into the same order inside a bucket I kicked over in anger because you got me raging again.

That's what I could say to someone I trusted, if I had a soul. Or even a soul with some kind of future.

I'm writing this as though I had a soul, or could have one. I'd like to see it as a substitute for a promise, or for the future I long to encounter. And perhaps the most important thing in all of this is that I would like to find myself in the moment when I realize I've begun to possess a soul.

Why think about a promise at all? Why enter that bond once again, surrender myself to its rule, only to take my freedom away from myself again? I'm afraid that in everything I live and everything I contemplate—including the everydayness that I am without remorse, granting myself the right to weakness—the promise remains central.

Promising myself something is never innocent. It doesn't grant me some kind of fundamental relief for free.

It enslaves.
As when food is promised to an animal.
It will quench its thirst. It will strengthen its body.

When I reach the watering hole and plunge my muzzle, terrified by dehydration, into a puddle or a stream that had the mercy not to dry up before I found it.

My compliant body, driven by instinct. It lives by it. Whether consciously or not.

I live by it not because some pre-subjective thing within me reflected on it. I live by it because something inscribed it into me.

Not always—or perhaps too often—I go "there" without making a decision, without taking responsibility for the outcome each time. Perhaps I am a construct held together by something that keeps binding me, binding me even before consciousness, before the part of me that might have chosen, had I truly known what any of this was about.

I wouldn't have begun this thread if you, too, weren't living at the very center—or in the shadow—of this tension. This is not speculation. It is a thesis that I am planting as the central force that normalizes life.

— This is what your future good should look like. Look, everything has its own rules. This is exactly how it will turn out.

— This is how you'll find fulfillment. Just a little longer. Once everything clicks into place. After that, you'll gather speed on the rails.

Not only promised, but promised through a plan—a plan repeated across generations, a plan meant to be accessible, universal, and shared by all. Where was I while all this was happening? Someone, preparing this process, was bringing the promised state into being. All you have to do is "pass through."

Culture constructs structures of normative promises, and it does so for different purposes. Perhaps it is simply the nature of things that, at a certain stage, processes draw us toward similar, recurring cycles. By endlessly repeating familiar circulations, we manage anxiety through tools that our predecessors have tested, more or less successfully. I generally struggle with the question of whether they were ever right about any of it. Wherever I cannot determine things for myself, the norm takes my place in everything that happens. Now—perhaps this is only my imagination—many of these principles seem stretched to the limit of their own density, while the systems woven across different spheres begin to come apart at the weave, leaving openings through which that which has always lurked somewhere begins to seep, that which we usually refuse to see.

 

And all of this because, for decades, our part of the world has been handed a system that was meant to clothe itself in values.

Perhaps nothing even has to become visible; perhaps it is enough simply to feel, consciously or not, that there is something there waiting to reveal itself. Perhaps the civilizational system is beginning to leak—not because it is about to collapse, but because it has become permeable, and will never again return to its former façade, to holding the whole arrangement in place. I have no desire to define the present, but what I am trying to grasp is a field of unrest more intense than usual. It is shaped by many factors, but what I cannot ignore is the mutual entanglement of fear, promise, and the comfort of having space for that passionate tension.

I need a minimum of time, or a minimum of energy—some reserve, some "surplus" that I can burn on a question I sometimes never even ask. I live with it. Perhaps that question is partly who I am, seeping into my morphology. Only its effect resounds, stripped of the content I can never quite reach. Is that a privilege? Having a reserve is not immoral, especially where modesty allows for nothing more than survival. And yet there is something tempting about saying: you've got the time, you're overflowing. Except those energies no longer obey such simple formulas as half of "our" world would probably like to believe, where everything is supposedly simple: you just have to clean up.

Perhaps that is precisely why it is becoming harder and harder to distinguish what is still to come from what has already taken up residence within me. I no longer know whether I am still waiting, or whether I have already become waiting itself. Is the promise leading me by the hand, or has it simply been breathing through me for a long time? I believe less and less in a clear boundary between what is yet to happen and what has long been unfolding within expectation itself.

From the very beginning of this text, the essential question seemed to be whether everything I am trying to begin speaking about ultimately comes down to a desperate desire to pass through the eye of the needle.

Yes, I know I must take the burden from my shoulders, perhaps even kneel, in order to pass through that Jerusalem gate. The impossibility that, in the gesture of a final decision, becomes possible, makes that passage—won through a titanic effort—bring me an experience that will make it happen; yes, it is precisely that experience that will place me on the other side. Does this inoculation bring about that experience in which tension and energy reach such an intensity that what had been impossible suddenly becomes tangible, and the eye—the narrow passage—grants the experience, grants the experience of that long-awaited and promised passage?

It is difficult, but it is possible.

This narrowing is a stripping away, a kind of turning inside out, a transformation, the fulfillment I await in tension as I mature into the state in which I "pass through." Do I then also receive that promised individuation? And when everything within me falls apart, when I experience that disintegration, and when the passage is so narrow that on the other side there can only be that better tomorrow, is it not there that the one who longs for a better ordering of everything awaits? My new self, dressed in a costume that covers a transformed body—or a transformed spirit. Or perhaps it is rather the one to whom everything has already become indifferent, the one awaiting absolute collapse, absolute scorched earth. These extreme poles in no way exhaust what I have been trying to speak about for this brief moment.

Something else entirely is that, within such immense enclosure, within such a small space, my process reaches so profound a state of being fixed to a single point that it is reduced to it, compressed by it, unable to expand. Perhaps it is only then that I can imagine I will be transformed, because I await it as the threshold toward which I am moving. Not a single gram of consciousness is required for my whole body to feel the experience that lies behind it. Moved by it, I reach for all kinds of ways either to discharge it or, precisely, to arrive at that place which is the point of change. And that state, unable to withstand its own excess, may indeed lead to an explosion. But that critical point does not have to resolve itself so dramatically. It may end in something utterly unspectacular—another everyday nothing, which, even within the space of media communities and endless streams of information, exists only as a short-lived, highly combustible, yet ultimately inconsequential event.

 

 

2

Perhaps that is precisely why I find myself returning more and more often to the situation of performance. To the encounter with the real action of a person in a space shared with others. Perhaps this place is privileged because it is dedicated to experience itself. At its core lies the most primordial need to meet and to exist within an altogether different reality. This is how we distinguish the ordinary from the "extraordinary." Much like a promise, and much like a certain kind of imprinted tension, the site of art unfolding in time contains a particular bond that engages the body—I come there, or I wait for those who will come, carrying a certain potential, conscious or not, to pass into another place. Despite the absence of any measurable result, to some extent—or perhaps to an overwhelmingly decisive extent—we come to that one place with a fairly clear intention. Amid sound, which speaks directly about nothing, explains nothing, that particular kind of readiness is set in motion almost automatically.

It is as though, for a brief moment, many separate tensions had come close enough to one another for something to happen that can neither be predicted nor repeated. And yet repetition itself has been keeping me awake for years. Empirically, I have grounds to claim that performance can "manage" repetition, because its essence lies not in the sameness of a repeatable experience but rather in its energetic and transcendent power. However pathetically this may sound, meaning always remains close at hand.

Regardless of whether generalization, in this case, serves my argument or somewhat undermines it, I have a deep conviction that a certain shift in meaning and forms of influence has taken place. For a period, contemporary music—especially the music that flourished most intensely in the first decade of this century—often operated through mechanisms that were, at least in part, similar to those by which the historical avant-gardes moved toward abstraction, while fully acknowledging the differences, the distinct conditions, and the momentum of history itself. Free improvisation emancipated music from composition. Laptop electronics, reductionism, lowercase, onkyo, noise, and related practices gradually abstracted it from rhythm, harmony, melody, and, at times, even from the instrument and the performer themselves. At the same time, the home studio, computers, and affordable electronics detached the production of sound from institutions and professional infrastructures. Music in search of a radical form was perhaps transforming itself toward the most open—and precisely the most abstracted—form possible. The principal creative energy turned toward the development of the medium itself rather than toward the direct articulation of contemporary social and political tensions. This does not, of course, mean that these works could not be read politically; rather, that their radicality resided primarily within the language of art itself, rather than in commenting directly on contemporary reality.

 

To simplify the entire process by saying that today we may be witnessing a reinvention of this practice—one that has either changed its language or significantly expanded it. I will leave the process of that transformation aside. What interests me most is how these gestures operate today, and how their affective efficacy differs from the one they once possessed.

Nor do I know whether one can truly speak of a change that has become characteristic of many artists working performatively. What is undoubtedly noticeable, however, is a shift in the way a concert—or other performative actions in which the crucial element is not musical material in the traditional sense, not melody, not rhythm, but rather the density of sound, its unfolding in time, or, for example, the sonic objects employed by the artist—affects us.

They activate—not only in the process of creation but also in the process of reception and participation—various kinds of patterns, often, one might even say, archetypal ones, within the recipient, who need not be aware of them at all. Given the minimum conditions—openness and a willingness to accept what is taking place—deeply affective, emotional responses may emerge. These responses, in truth, concern the inner life of the recipient, who may be in need of a certain kind of process, one that everyday life perhaps never allows them to experience with such intensity.

The physicality of sound, its presence within the concert hall or in whatever other space it takes place, changes the way presence itself functions. Every kind of tension accumulated within the body and, let us call it for the sake of simplicity, within the spirituality of the listener, of the participant, simply operates differently.

This could sound like a description of a certain mechanism or methodology, recalling historical projects—from Futurism to certain practices within industrial culture—in which there emerged the temptation to design a new sensibility, a new human being, or a new spirituality in totalitarian terms. But here it operates on a far more fundamental level: not as a matter of decision, not as an act of striving, but rather as finding oneself in such a situation.

I can risk a certain reduction, which I hope is not merely speculation, because these phenomena materialize in many of the situations I experience. And I experience them from both sides of this process.

 

Should talking about the various conditions of affect—its scale, magnitude, and reach, from the private to the geopolitical—not frighten me and make me want to escape the responsibility of formulating theses about micro-ignitions, processes of transition, and the circulations of accumulations, explosions, or burnouts? Does this line of thought make any sense at all? Does a public statement advancing such a thesis not belong instead to the realm of usurpation, feeding precisely the tensions and the growing, seething toxic haze in which private conversations, shouts in the street, and the media slop that contradicts itself with every new piece of news and every new post all unfold? I am proposing nothing that comes anywhere close to such a mechanism, although I am fully aware of the risk of falling into the pattern of someone unable to distinguish inquiry from projection and dubious descriptions of reality.

Regardless of whether we are dealing with a ritual function of managing anxiety—which may, rather seductively, feed conspiracy theories—or with an extraordinary accumulation of uncoordinated processes leading to similar outcomes, reality is visibly swelling with multiplied tensions, extreme burnouts, and eruptions of passionate entanglements.

Whether I have the right to or not, I have to speak about it.

Perhaps the very fact that something must be spoken, expressed, poured out through loudspeakers, requires neither an informative nor a declarative message. Perhaps that is precisely why it works this way; perhaps that is why a form that seemingly carries no message becomes its perfect embodiment. This affective phenomenon, so difficult to capture in words, hangs in space, is space, is reality, is everywhere. It embraces not only the part of me that remains unconscious and unknown to me, the part that feels hunger, but also the parts I live by, the ones I recognize. It speaks through what I long to see the following day, where I imagine myself after the change.

Then I tremble in a feverish cogitation, wondering how long I can carry something, how long I can keep waiting for something, when these are only two bipolar bonds among countless others, dissolving into the mass we ceaselessly create.

One of the most essential bonds that never disappears from what is "shared" is an admiration for life. In the most difficult situations—those I have not spoken about throughout this text, yet which undoubtedly return again and again, reminding us of themselves—that admiration remains present. It is present also in the radical events that affect so many people every day, and because of which many of them lose their lives. And even when it disappears, its absence carries profound meaning.

Perhaps it is precisely in this sense, and in this spirit, that we enter into contracts concerning things that do not yet exist. The existence—or non-existence—of a contractual condition does not determine either its validity or the weight of the act itself. This happens without negotiation, without contractual agreement, because the "thing" concerns a phenomenon that everyone either understands or is, without much difficulty, capable of or willing to experience. Stripping the promise of its burden means that agreeing upon future harvests that do not yet exist not only reconfigures the order of things, but above all turns the risk undertaken by both parties into a bond rather than a field of expectation.

This deliberate shift from a legal construct into the realm of affective experience illustrates a mechanism that, in itself, organizes the reality in which we encounter the living act of sound. When we share risk together, our affects, our passages, are—or may be—a different kind of experience from all those I have been trying, fragment by fragment, to speak about since the beginning of this text. Our future harvests are not promised. They are not part of an ideology. They are not part of the narratives we construct in order to speak constructively about the future.

Rather, they are that elusive yet ever-present phenomenon—much like an admiration for life—that grants us an inseparable privilege while also becoming the bond without which both our most intimate and our shared experiences would remain dispersed.

If we assume that we consent to this shared risk when we enter this space, it is not because we believe in the future, but because entering into this relation is already a profoundly tangible good. A good that does not require future fulfillment, because it is born from the very act of entering, together, into possibility.

 

— — You know, standing here now, in front of this and within what is happening, I don't need to know what comes next. That's enough for me. It even reminds me of something that has stayed with me for so long—that none of this is really clear... and that's okay.