Drum & Donald

Donald Duck is one of my favorite figures: His grandiose misfortune is equaled only by his uncompromising arrogant self-confidence. When faced with some form of hardship, Donald resolutely responds with unrelenting fury. That way, any minor obstacle quickly spirals into a major catastrophe. Donald's reality is of profound and tragic humor, ruled by extreme violence. His body, however, can handle anything, it is infinitely flexible. Donald stretches and squashes and swooshes and splashes and spins and slams and shakes and smacks and smashes. And we laugh until we cry.

Certain strands of drum & bass echoes this excessive cartooney character. Over a bed of ambiguous ambient atmosphere an assault of shape-shifting rhythmic slapstick zips and zooms and zigzags. The soundtrack to this video was itself produced in a frenzy, as part of an entire album of drum & bass made during a month of complete internet free in 2018. 

Listen to the rest of the album here.

Modes of thought: spiralling and bouncing

What shape does your thought process have? I propose there to be at least two diverging modes:

The bouncer is quick, as a ball it springs outward and when hitting something else it bounces back. Its preferred movement is variation. The bouncer loathes going deeper.  The bouncer disrespects boundaries, both disciplinary and between different beings, asking others what they know – even if that other is so radically different to answer in ways beyond words, such as a playing dog or a flowering plant. If it does not get feedback it quickly empties itself out. The easiest way to calm the process of a bouncer is to offer them nothing in return.

The spiraller is slow, an inward withdrawal which feeds upon itself. Its preferred movement is deepening. The spiraller loathes variation. The spiraller seeks to understand and stay within its own limits, exploring what it knows, what it can know, and indeed what could possibly be known, even when such insight may slow the thought process down to make any movement impossible. If it does not get feedback it can keep spiralling. The easiest way to calm a spiraller is to offer them something in return.



For spirallers the bouncer can seem superficial, too quick to incorporate responses and move on. For bouncers the spiraller can seem too slow and hostile against incorporating empirical material. The spiraller seems like a bore, while the bouncer seems sloppy.

This distinction can be fruitful for understanding one of the major divides in contemporary philosophy, that of object-orientation versus new materialism. Both fields regularly claim philosophical commitment to reality, to inquiry into non-anthropocentric reality. The major divide between these philosophical trajectories can be summarized as the question of whether reality is fundamentally interconnected matter (new materialism) or discrete objects (object-oriented). Object-orientation holds reality to be made up of essences which always escape us. New materialism, on the other hand, renders reality as constantly changing and evolving. While this is an ontological question, it might not be as fundamental as either of these schools hold them to be, as the withdrawn and evolving nature of reality does not necessarily oppose each other. The division can perhaps be approached as techniques for aligning reality with modes of thought : the object-oriented can insist on their spiral feeling of reality withdrawing, while new materialists can keep their bouncy feeling of reality as variation.