Ghosts of the gristleized: Throbbing Gristle, hauntology and control

The stated intention of British post-punk band, Throbbing Gristle (TG), was to harness sound to create a ‘metabolic music’ which assaulted and fastened on to the bodies of the audience in order to disarticulate them and open them up to the possibility of life (‘We try to imagine that they are all already dead’, said band-member Genesis P-Orridge). TG called to the spirits of their ‘dead’ audience. Just as Francis Bacon claimed that, in his art, unknown forces dictated involuntary, asignifying marks which could disrupt the effects of habit and convention to unlock new sensations and diagram the possibility of a different order, a different space, I claim that TG’s music evoked a sonic diagram. We can embrace the nervous optimism of their art as a hauntological injunction (Derrida) to disarticulate the networked body of the society of control, to germinate the multitude, the ‘people to come’, from within the serpent’s coils.