The Abstract Reality of the "Hardcore Continuum"

Abstract

The debate around whether the “hardcore continuum” (henceforth HCC) – see the previous article by Jeremy Gilbert for the background – should be classified as a “theory” or a “fact” has raised important issues about the relationship between music criticism and theory. What I propose to do here is offer a brief defence of both the HCC and of theory. Put very schematically, the recent objections to the concept of the “hardcore continuum” culture seem to take two basic forms: (1) there never was such a thing as the hardcore continuum in the first place; and (2) there was such a thing as the hardcore continuum, but it is no longer relevant to today’s dance music. Ironically, given the professed anti-theoretical intentions of many of the objectors to the HCC, both these objections cannot be resolved by appeal to facts, since both very quickly raise deeply philosophical questions – questions that, as it happens, are at the centre of intense current debates surrounding speculative realism and objectoriented philosophy. The reason that appeals to a supposedly direct, pre-theoretical “experience” must fail is that both the objections turn on the question of what a “thing” is, a question, which to say the very least, has philosophical implications. Empiricism, even in a far more sophisticated form than the so-called “buffoon empiricism” espoused by Dan Hancox at the “Hardcore Continuum” symposium at the University of East London on 29th April 2009 precisely ran aground because it could give no convincing answer to this question. Indeed, it is one of the problems on which British empiricism ran aground: far from being a flux of primary qualities and raw sensations that is cut up into objects only after the fact, the very “experience” that empiricists privilege is already impregnated with “thinghood”. Once you subtract generalised concepts not given in immediate sensations, you don’t end up with the concrete certainties that buffoon empiricism appeals to. Instead, as Berkeley ingeniously demonstrated, the material world itself disappears (there is no sensation that corresponds to “matter”; it has to be inferred as the cause of those sensations). David Hume found that the self and causality would also disintegrate, since they are not experienced as sensations either. Thus, the appeal to direct sensation would not end up in a lumpen commonsense, but in a psychosis. The first objection must give an account of what a “thing” is, without assuming that such a definition is already given to us by unreflective experience. The hardcore continuum was something that Simon Reynolds identified in the 1990s, but named retrospectively. In his presentation at FACT in Liverpool,1 Reynolds used what would come to be a controversial analogy, arguing that the HCC is a “fact” in the same way that Australia – the land mass, with its flora and fauna, as opposed to the politically-constituted “nation” – is. I want to argue here that Reynolds’ tactical retreat from theory is a mistake. However, I wouldn’t want to go as