Travis Miller’s “Ethics”
“Success is not a triumph but a necessity… There's no mistaking it: You are only rewarded for the risks you are prepared to take. Once out of context, actions become indefinable. Any will power or ambition that is brought to bear is arbitrary. There are no external, urgent necessities to justify choices of profession, hobbies, or partners; no force or coercion to render life evident. Everything must come from within” (ADILKNO, “Out of Context,” 175).
In the first volume of Travis Miller’s beat-tape masterpiece[1], Three Sided Tape, the words above are uttered by a spectral commentator during the first portion of a song entitled “Ethics.” The melodramatic air of the music (melody sampled from Lucio Dalla’s tribute to opera singer Enrico Caruso) is as drawn out as the working day is long, despite the piece only lasting two and a half minutes. The words which introduce the piece, though I do not know who speaks them here, belong to the collective known as the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge, or ADILKNO. The Foundation was formed from the margins of a burgeoning neoliberal society, in 1983, out of the squatters and pirate radio movements in Amsterdam. Existing at the limits of society, these theorist-auteurs were able to establish a site of critique that is rarely examined in theory today, yet boundlessly rich in critical material. Here I will borrow from a different Italian than Miller does, Maurizio Lazzarato, along with several other philosophers, in order to flesh out the portrait of life that Miller and ADILKNO are painting for us— disregarding, of course, questions about the song’s intended meaning.
After the vocal sample, all that can be heard in “Ethics” is the word “work,” uttered repeatedly by an ephemeral voice in what one might call an epithetical fashion. I use epithetical because, rather than allowing an exclamation of the titular “ethics” over and over again, Miller has replaced it with “work.” In the past several decades, since the birth of the neoliberal economic-political regime, work has become a common musical subject in popular culture, cutting across communities and identities indiscriminately— one may well ask, however, how this differs from work as a musical subject before neoliberalism. Blues artists in the early to mid-twentieth century routinely released songs about work, but many (if not most) took an aversive approach to it [2]. Far from the reach of Miller, “work” has become a laudatory and exclamatory subject of the contemporary music industry in many cases, from RuPaul’s “Supermodel (You Better Work)” in ADILKNO’s heyday to Rihanna’s “Work” more recently. What this phenomenon amounts to is evidence of the fashion in which work (and above all, “work on the self”) has come to replace ethics completely, if not also life in general.
In his text on laziness, Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work, Lazzarato writes the following with respect to what we’ve all been working on for the past few decades:
Like the vast majority of roles and functions, the artist is not bound to an employer but to a range of apparatuses of power. As “human capital,” which the artist himself has ironically come to epitomize under neoliberalism, he too must submit to "external" powers as well as to the hold over his "ego" (a creative ego assigned to the human capital of artist and entrepreneur alike, one which instills in both the illusion of being free) (Lazzarato, Marcel Duchamp, 6).
Similarities between Lazzarato’s thought here and the essay by ADILKNO abound. One might say that the Foundation began to identify the same traits of neoliberalism as Lazzarato almost twenty years earlier. The “dedication, subjective motivation, and the work on the self preached by management since the 1980s” (Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man, 9) was all too evident for the squatters and radio pirates of the same period, whose DIY culture (in the anarchistic sense of the term) must have been a necessary response to the system which granted this new work its primacy. Even theory itself, according to ADILKNO, failed to escape this system:
[T]hat which presents itself as metatheory is, in fact, the theory of orientation; that is, the successor to the theology of ethics. It presents regulations of action, directives for task forces. Heavy theory has thus been devalued to the level of marketing and management (ADILKNO, “Out of Context,” 178).
We are seeing a development which had already been suggested by Nietzsche in The Gay Science, that “Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than someone else… More and more, work enlists all good conscience on its side” (Nietzsche, 259). This manifests constantly in our disquieting and monolithic neoliberal reality: our ethics is enslaved to a managerial, entrepreneurial vision of the world, effecting what Lazzarato has identified as “a process of individualization that aims to neutralize ‘collective’ logics” (Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man, 101). It is easy, then, to imagine how this new regime (which is first and foremost a capitalist one) operates on the original relations within Marx’s political economy: “if we put aside the content of the relation between creditor and debtor (money), we see that credit does not solicit and exploit labor but rather ethical action and the work of self-constitution at both an individual and collective level” (Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man, 55).
Travis Miller’s disruptive method of digital audio quotation/citation, which shows itself here in the decontextualized excerpting of ADILKNO’s essay, acquires a certain critical precision with regard to work’s epithetical character in its relation to ethics. Writing on Bertolt Brecht’s theater, Weimar critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin located the critical aspect of quotation in its ability to decontextualize— the ability to create a space for the logical deconstruction of ideology by disrupting its situated reception. “[The] discovery (alienation) of conditions takes place through the interruption of happenings… interruption is one of the fundamental methods of all structuring. It goes far beyond the sphere of art. To give only one example, it is the basis of quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context” (Benjamin, 150-151). The isolation and repetition of “work” which follows the excerpt emphasizes a re-emphasis: a renewed focus on the constant, imperative character of work under neoliberalism. The excerpt’s message, which is experienced in the first place as a motivational call to action for uplifting self-actualization, is unmasked once the epithet ensues. “Everything must come from within” takes on a rather sinister character when one begins to understand that the “creative ego” at the center of this work on the self is no less than the new primary house of production for Capital.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “What is Epic Theater?” Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, edited by
Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 2007, pp. 147-154.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition,
translated by Joshua David Jordan, semiotext(e), 2011.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work, translated by Joshua David
Jordan, semiotext(e), 2014.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Random House, 1974.
The Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge/ADILKNO. “Out of Context.” The
Media Archive: World Edition, translated by Laura Martz and Sakhra-l’Assal, Autonomedia, 1998, pp. 174-179.
Notes
Miller has taken on a myriad of pseudonyms. The most popular of these, and the one under which Three Sided Tape is published, is Lil Ugly Mane.
See, for instance, T-Bone Walker’s “Too Lazy (To Work and Too Nervous to Steal)” or Ray Charles’ “I’ll Do Anything But Work.”
3. Photo Citation: discogs.com
