Abstract
Blanchot took Mallarmé’s “Book” as the paradigm for an artwork that aspired to such excess it could not exist. And yet it partly did, in the form of the poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. For Blanchot, this ultimate literary work acted as a model for a relentless deconstructing not just of what existed but also of that which did not. His emptying theoretical perspective is ideally suited to analyse the phenomenon that is harsh noise wall music. This type of music aims to be both total and static, an extreme stilling of the music impulse, and even of noise itself. This stilling will of course fail, in the shape of recordings, concerts, recognizable “pieces,” but this failing puts it into the same realm as the Book, as glossed and mobilized by Blanchot, in that it exists but it should not. It cannot happen and yet it unfolds. Rather than failure, then, I argue that this type of noise music is one realization of Blanchot’s thinning, dissipating and disappearing of Mallarmé’s project. This (in)completion, present in these writers and in harsh noise wall, notably in the work of Romain Perrot (Vomir) is not just resemblance but is something that enables a reading, a return (in)completion of Blanchot. This article looks to stage this double reading, a reading that produces nothing. Actually, not even nothing.
Highlights
The total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk, promised to bring arts together, cutting a transversal swathe through the separate activities of music, theatre, dance and the visual arts
The new total work could function as a new beginning, one that would dredge through the gathered detritus of history, sift it, slowly and on an epic scale, so that the precious ore of the West could arise
Wagner was not alone in his dream of the total work, but others imagined it differently, and arguably the entire trajectory of modernist art is about the meta-genre of the total artwork
Summary
The total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk, promised to bring arts together, cutting a transversal swathe through the separate activities of music, theatre, dance and the visual arts. In traversing the idea of the total artwork, this essay takes Blanchot’s Le Livre à venir/The Book to Come as a means of approaching the 21st century avantgarde music that is harsh noise wall, an extreme full-spectrum genre of radical sonic stasis.
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