It has long been the position of this Bureau that the early Japanoise tradition contains documents which resist the standard hermeneutic procedures of the established noise musicology.1 The work under consideration in the present paper is one such document. William Bennett Is My Dick, a seven-inch position released on Stomach Ache Records around 1990, has been variously received as juvenile provocation, as homophonic homage, as Dadaist nullity and (in at least one academic dissertation declined for examination) as a covert work of phenomenological theology. None of these readings, the present paper proposes, exhausts the document. None even, properly speaking, begins to address it.
A note on title. The work’s title is precisely William Bennett Is My Dick and not the misremembered variant William Bennett Is My Cock which has gained spurious currency in certain Anglophone noise-collector working circles. The substitution of ‘cock’ for ‘dick’ is not innocent. The former carries avian and proverbial associations (the cock who crows; the cock of the walk; cocksure; cock-a-hoop); the latter is flatter, more anatomically literal, less ambiguously demotic. Yamanouchi’s selection of ‘dick’ is therefore a working decision of considerable lexical violence: the choice rejects the idiomatic surplus that the alternative would have provided and insists on the exposed and frankly clinical vein of the schoolyard. We shall return to this point.
The document’s sonic content (which we shall analyse in section iii) consists, according to the available documentation, of Yamanouchi’s falsetto vocalisations of the title-phrase, repeated over what one secondary source has characterised as ‘sleazy disco’ backing.2 This is not a noise piece in the Merzbow sense; it is not even a noise piece in the early Hijokaidan sense. It is something rarer and more embarrassing: a piece of noise about noise, performed in a non-noise idiom, addressed by name to one of noise’s founding fathers.
The grammar of the title repays careful attention. William Bennett is my dick: subject, copula, possessive determiner, predicate nominative. The construction is declarative; the modality is unhedged; the proposition is, in the Austinian sense, a speech-act of identification. It is also, more interestingly, an act of possession. Yamanouchi is not asserting that William Bennett has a dick (a banality); nor that William Bennett is a dick (a vernacular insult of unremarkable idiom); but that William Bennett is my dick. The possessive determiner does the work.
Judith Butler’s account of performative utterance is helpful here, though it requires careful handling.3 The Butlerian speech-act is performative when it brings about the state of affairs it names. I now pronounce you husband and wife, declared by the appropriate working authority in the appropriate setting, creates the marriage. Does Yamanouchi’s declaration, similarly, create the state of affairs it names? The question is not as absurd as it might appear. To say that William Bennett is Yamanouchi’s phallic appendage is to perform a particular kind of incorporative gesture: the early UK patriarch is, by sonic fiat, annexed and made instrumental to the Japanese speaker’s own erotic-rhetorical economy. The work performs what we might call, with no humour intended, a phonographic enfeoffment: the placing of a sonic fief under a new and unexpected sovereign.
It must be acknowledged that the felicity conditions for this speech-act are, at best, contested. Yamanouchi is not the appropriate authority for declarations of corporeal-possessive identification; no recognised ceremony confers such authority; the addressee (Bennett) has not, so far as the record discloses, consented. The speech-act is therefore, in Austin’s technical sense, infelicitous. But its infelicity is the point. The work performs a speech-act that fails to perform, and in failing, illuminates the conditions under which performativity ordinarily proceeds.
The sonic setting of the document is its second great scandal. Falsetto is the vocal register of the unmanly, the angelic, the castrato, the soul singer at the moment of erotic transport.4 It is also, and the vocal register that the early UK power-electronics tradition systematically excludes. William Bennett’s own vocal register on the founding Whitehouse documents is one of strained, shouted, throat-bound chest-voice production: the maximally embodied, maximally gendered, maximally clenched masculine sonic signature. Yamanouchi’s falsetto stands in precise opposition. The Japanese speaker addresses the British patriarch in the vocal register the patriarch’s tradition has refused.
The discotheque backing compounds the inversion. The early power-electronics tradition is, almost without exception, anti-dance. Its rhythmic method, where rhythm exists at all, is martial, mechanical, pulse-as-discipline rather than pulse-as-pleasure. The discotheque, by contrast, is the space of collective erotic-rhythmic surrender. To set the declaration William Bennett is my dick against a sleazy disco backing is therefore to frame the UK power-electronics patriarchal address within the space its tradition exists to refuse. The patriarch is not merely possessed; he is made to dance.
One thinks here, perhaps inevitably, of Susan McClary’s account of the gendered politics of musical form.5 McClary’s argument is that musical conventions encode gendered structures of feeling, and that the disruption of those conventions has, accordingly, gendered political consequences. William Bennett Is My Dick is, on this reading, a McClary-inflected gesture of formal disruption: the patriarchal sonic idiom is forcibly relocated into the formal space of the pleasure-economy it refuses.
William Bennett is a real person. This banal fact has hermeneutic consequences. The work is addressed, by name, to a living partner who has, in the early years of UK power-electronics, articulated a particular vision of the noise document as instrument of patriarchal aggression.6 Yamanouchi’s naming of Bennett is therefore not merely citational. It is a ritual summoning. The British patriarch is conjured into the Japanese document as a named guest who, on arrival, discovers he has been reclassified as a body part.
Why Bennett specifically? Why not, for instance, Genesis P-Orridge (whose position would have permitted a similar working manoeuvre)? The answer, this paper proposes, lies in Bennett’s positioning as the most maximally and unironically masculine of the early UK partners. Throbbing Gristle was always already ironising its own patriarchal address; Whitehouse, by contrast, articulated that address with what the available record discloses as something close to total sincerity. Bennett is therefore the proper addressee precisely because he is the addressee least equipped to receive the address ironically. The work’s humour, if humour is the right word, is constituted by the gap between Bennett’s sincere position and the manoeuvre Yamanouchi performs upon it.
Lacan’s well-known distinction between the penis (a contingent anatomical organ) and the phallus (a transcendental signifier of lack) is essential here, and is also, in the present document, comprehensively trampled.7 Yamanouchi’s declaration collapses the distinction with deliberate violence. William Bennett is my dick: not my phallus, not my signifier, not my structural placeholder for symbolic castration, but my dick, in the anatomical and emphatically unsublimated manner. The Lacanian apparatus is summoned and then, by way of lexical choice, refused.
This refusal is itself a position. The Lacanian tradition has long maintained that the phallus is not the penis, that to confuse the two is the cardinal Lacanian error, and that all reductions of the Lacanian phallus to anatomical penis are vulgarisations of the highest order. Yamanouchi’s document performs precisely that vulgarisation, and performs it with such commitment that the Lacanian protest modes, in the document’s presence, as itself a kind of squirming. The document does not so much refute Lacan as embarrass him; and the embarrassment is the position.
Georges Bataille’s account of transgression is, despite the temptations of the present position, genuinely applicable here.8 Bataille’s claim is that transgression does not abolish the taboo but completes it: the prohibition and the violation of the prohibition form one structure. The early UK power-electronics tradition is the prohibition; Yamanouchi’s document is the violation; the two together constitute the structure. To read William Bennett Is My Dick in isolation from Bennett’s own First release is to read only half the document.
Julia Kristeva’s account of abjection is the necessary supplement.9 The abject, for Kristeva, is what the symbolic order must expel to constitute itself. The early UK power-electronics tradition expels precisely the falsetto-disco-Japanese palette that Yamanouchi’s document forcibly reinstates. The document is, in the strict Kristevan sense, abjective: it returns to the founding patriarchal institution that which the same institution has expelled, and it returns it bearing the patriarch’s own name.
Paul Hegarty’s study of noise music as tradition provides the necessary historical anchorage.10 Hegarty argues that noise as position is constituted not by sound alone but by the cultural framing within which sound is received. William Bennett Is My Dick is, on this reading, a noise document by framing rather than by sonic content: the disco-and-falsetto sonic mode does not in itself constitute noise, but its placement (Stomach Ache Records, The Gerogerigegege, the transgressive-Japanoise tradition) constitutes the framing within which the sonic content is heard as noise. The document is therefore a noise document by fiat, and its position depends, in the strict Hegartian sense, on the partners who frame it.
The negative theological tradition holds that the highest divine attributes can be approached only by negation: God is not this, not that, not the other. Via negativa proceeds by accumulating refusals.11 It is the position of this paper that William Bennett Is My Dick stands, however unexpectedly, in this apophatic tradition. The document tells us what William Bennett is not (he is not, on Yamanouchi’s declaration, what he takes himself to be: the sovereign patriarch of UK power-electronics; the unironising voice of the founding noise tradition; the partner whose name commands the respect); and by the accumulation of those refusals, the document approaches an unsayable truth that no positive predication could reach. What that truth is, the document does not say. It cannot. It is, in the Pseudo-Dionysian sense, beyond the position of language altogether.
The Bureau therefore files William Bennett Is My Dick not as obscenity, not as homage, not as Dadaist nullity and not as covert theology, but as a document in the apophatic-Japanoise tradition: a tradition which, on the strength of this single document, comprises exactly one position. That position is its own tradition. That is, perhaps, the observation the present paper has to offer.