Experimental Communities

In the introduction to Michael Nyman's book "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond" Brian Eno notes that almost all of the small hardcore group of twenty-thirty people who attended experimental music performances in Britain in the 1960s were themselves experimental artists. Christian Wolff said something similar about the 1950s New York scene. Similar things have also been said by various people about the early respective histories of the New York and UK punk scenes. Furthermore, I would suppose a similar logic to be at work with the virtual community in development today.

In any case, in all of these cases, two aesthetic principles were and are at work. Firstly: the idea that "anyone could play it" - the idea that no special training was required to make art, indeed, the idea that "art does not exist". Secondly, the idea that the barrier between the performer and the audience could be broken down, and that an event not reducible to either could be erected from the ruins of this barrier.

In all of this, in a certain way the logic at work was paradoxical. This, because the series of discrete "events" created from the series of specific happenings were in a sense nothing but particular instantiations of a kind of meta-event was always-already going on: the meta-event of the experimental community itself which was generating these occurances, but this meta-event was in fact nothing except that aggregate of the discrete events, retroactively supposed by them, rather than preexisting them.

What to make of this? It is difficult to say, partly because this paradox raises a question that is difficult to think. This is the question of the "before the event" - the question of what was happening, "before" there was an experimental community with enough self-belief, to believe in its own self.

Writing in "For Marx" on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Louis Althusser issues the following - for him, extremely uncharacteristic elegy. He says: "In the general context of the human development which may be said to make urgent, if not inevitable, all great historical discoveries, the individual who makes himself the author of one of them is of necessity in the paradoxical situation of having to learn the way of saying what he is going to discover in the very way he must forget. Perhaps but, too, it is this situation which gives Marx’s Early Works that tragic imminence and permanence, that extreme tension between a beginning and an end, between a language and a meaning, out of which no philosophy could come without forgetting that the destiny they are committed to is irreversible."

If we can read this passage with reference to the idea of a community, rather than the idea of the individual, we might begin to examine the question of how the notion of an experimental community - of a community-in-becoming - might be rendered legible.