21 Jun 2007
In an excellent article, “Digital music and subculture”, available at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_2/ebare/, Sean Ebare (no relation) discusses how emergent musical forms become labelled genres. “Without a genre label, a work exists in a limbo-like state… There the work is strange, marginally understood, and (according to most major label reps) marginally saleable at best”.
Apparently this limbo has been called, by another scholar, the “antigeneric moment”. It is “something of a collective identity crisis that calls for resolution, so that music fans can again make sense of their world”.
Which begs the question: why this obsessive human need to label things before we can understand them? Does the labelling help understanding, or hinder it?
The description of this state as “antigeneric” seems inappropriate to me. This state is described as an inherently unstable one which must resolve itself into one of genre or oblivion. As such, it is “pregeneric” or maybe “pre-non-generic”, but it is not “anti-generic”. On the contrary, it actively seeks its label, it is uncomfortable living without.
Tantra, however, shows us that we must live in this antigeneric moment, in a truly antigeneric moment, because the “sense” that we make of the world is a perpetual accretion of nonsense that only serves to distance us from experience. The transition to genre repudiates rather than resolves tension, it crystallizes irreal manifestations of experience by giving them a name and, in so doing, leads us away from non-duality.
What “is” tantra? The question cannot be answered without asserting what it is not. And by asserting what it is and what it is not, its meaning can only be lost. This is why, and the sense in which, tantra is anti-religion, tantra is anti-tantra. It is antigeneric and all attempts to pin it down, label it, authenticate and delimit it, can only lead away from what it is that we are talking about, something that we arbitrarily label tantra but not to differentiate it from non-tantra, simply to be able to talk at all.
Personally I have a particular aversion to relationship labels. They serve to characterize my relations neither in a positive nor a negative sense – they neither adequately capture what they mean to me, nor what they do not mean. They do, however, help many people to avoid listening to what I am saying or feeling what they are feeling. I cannot avoid using them, nor can I invent my own, nor maybe should I – as Barry Long says, we must live in this world with our masks, but they must not stick to our skin. Underneath the mask, though, is something else, something deeper and more beautiful, something that you are really looking for but do not perceive – the “antigeneric moment”.