Sillon
4
Back about two and a half years ago, when I wrote about Martin Küchen’s previous solo release, “Music from One of the Provinces in the Empire” (Confront), I complained a bit about the “technique display” aspect of the recording and hoped that he would expand on some of the very interesting ideas seen there in glimpses. Well, count me as one satisfied listener today.
Five tracks for alto and baritone (and “pocket radio”), each taking its time to investigate, scour and sometimes eviscerate an idea. In that sense, in its extreme intensity of focus, it recalls Stephane Rives’ Potlatch disc from a few years back though the saxophonist I most often find myself thinking of is Michel Doneda. As with his music, there’s a pervasive feeling of earthen floors, of wood and oil, as though Küchen is not so much blowing through a metal tube as operating some obscure machinery in an enormous, ancient, dark room. That he achieves great depth here is attested to, for this listener, by the near total lack of interest in what techniques are employed. One could listen to the music in that manner, noting buzz-producing artifacts that are doubtless utilized, but it’s entirely beside the point as would be determining which tracks are on alto, which on baritone (something I actually don’t think I could often do—oh, okay the last one’s on bari). Each stands apart, this one cloudy and mysterious, that one harrowing, but every track has a palpable presence and unique sense of self and they’re all tough as concrete. While the album might be said to peak with the third cut (that harrowing one), the final two are utterly absorbing, especially the subaqueous burps in the last, just an incredible sound field, the cavernous explosions ever so slightly tinged with some high, prickly atmospherics.
If Küchen refers at all to a “sacred man”, that man is traveling through the sort of devastation shown in the accompanying photo, in which a bird perches on a limb of rebar extruded from a bombed out building. A rough, very strong set.
Posted by Brian Olewnick on October 30, 2007 5:21 PMFrom Wikipedia's Giorgio Agamben entry:
In his main work "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" (1998), Giorgio Agamben analyzes an obscure figure of Roman law that poses some fundamental questions to the nature of law and power in general. Under the Roman Empire, a man who committed a certain kind of crime was banned from society and all of his rights as a citizen were revoked. He thus became a "homo sacer" (sacred man). In consequence, he could be killed by anybody -- while his life on the other hand was deemed "sacred", so he could not be sacrificed in a ritual ceremony.
Roman law no longer applied to someone deemed a Homo sacer, although they would remain "under the spell" of law. Agamben defines it as "human life...included in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion (that is, of its capacity to be killed)". Homo sacer was therefore excluded from law itself, while being included at the same time. This figure is the exact mirror image of the sovereign (Basileus) -- a king, emperor, or president -- who stands, on the one hand, within law (so he can be condemned, e.g., for treason, as a natural person) and outside of the law (since as a body politic he has power to suspend law for an indefinite time).
Indeed, Giorgio Agamben draws on Carl Schmitt's definition of the Sovereign as the one who has the power to decide the state of exception (or justitium), where law is indefinitely "suspended" without being abrogated. But if Schmitt's aim is to include the necessity of state of emergency under the rule of law, Agamben on the contrary demonstrates that all life can't be subsumed by law. As in Homo sacer, the state of emergency is the inclusion of life and necessity in the juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion.
Since its origins, Agamben notes, law has had the power of defining what "bare life" (zoe, as opposed to bios: qualified life) is by making this exclusive operation, while at the same time gaining power over it by making it the subject of political control. The power of law to actively separate "political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has carried on from Antiquity to Modernity -- from, literally, Aristotle to Auschwitz. Aristotle, as Agamben notes, constitutes political life via a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of "bare life": as Aristotle says, man is an animal born to life (zen), but existing with regard to the good life (eu zen) which can be achieved through politics. Bare life, in this ancient conception of politics, is that which must be transformed, via the State, into the "good life"; that is, bare life is that which is supposedly excluded from the higher aims of the state, yet is included precisely so that it may be transformed into this "good life". Sovereignty, then, is conceived from ancient times as a state of exception. According to Agamben, biopower, which takes the bare lives of the citizens into its political calculations, may be more marked in the modern state, but has essentially existed since the beginnings of sovereignty in the West, since this structure of ex-ception is essential to the core concept of sovereignty.[8]
Agamben would continue to expand the theory of the state of exception first introduced in "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life", ultimately leading "State of Exception" in 2005. During 2003, he delivered a lecture describing the eclipse that politics has undergone. Instead of leaving a space between law and life, the space where human action is possible, the space that used to constitute politics, he argues that politics has “contaminated itself with law” in the state of exception. Because “only human action is able to cut the relationship between violence and law”, it becomes increasingly difficult within the state of exception for humanity to act against the State[9]
Posted by: Joe at October 31, 2007 4:27 AM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................