The tongue ever turns to the
aching nothing
What we cannot speak about, we must speak
about
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno
If the limits of the extant
and its reproduction mark the common place
of the meditations on this vale of tears, and if the authentication
of life in effigy is the process to which we all "spontaneously"
devolve our unique biography, the efforts to not cooperate
with the
shame of reality, to escape it and, in a word, to run off
from it at top speed, like a private who'd wish to serve
for another
time, are all our poor honour. It's not the signifier, as
Lacan says, that never lets us alone, but it's the insignificant
that always shadows us. It's easy to understand, then,
how little attractive are the circumstances that attract
us from our retreat's starting blocks to these reflections
on the tango nuevo: actually, they are more due
to the ideology and the false conscience of its salesmen
than to the relevance
of its
results. The golden age's outcome wasn't
less flat: even then, plenty of us were good at dancing badly.
However, the mainstream tango's paltriness was at least varnished
by the familiarity with the language and by shared
style rules that gave an appearance of meaning also to stuttering
and schematism. As a matter of fact, what we call the tradition,
in tango as in every art, is none other than a historically
acquired chain of innovations. Its legitimacy only comes
from the continuos and dramatic measurement with what goes
beyond it, that's to say the new. In tango, the sole licensed
actors of this belligerant philology have always been the
milongueros, who have mostly attacked the tradition
by defending it. The very few among them who were named maestros
until twenty years ago,
have been expressing forms closely connected with
a constantly evolving music, to which they were linked
by a mutual social mandate; these forms were the rectification
and the realization of a "common speech": no truth
was accepted by the milonga, but that one they
could fill and make commensurable to all the bystanders.
Somehow, those creators
have been holding themselves responsible for the tango common
lots. The invention of the new, before being a flaming science,
was presence, unity of place and goals, coherence of signs,
syntactical articulation; its verification was a precise
dialectic accomplishment. For this reason, all along the
tango phylogenesis, many implications have always sprung
up from every true renewal: suffice it to think to the woman's
sobrepaso (cross) in the Twenties, to the Lavandina's giro in
all its variants in the Forties, to the ultimate embrace
in the tango salòn or to the Antonio Todaro's
astonishing choreography. Whatever coped out of those creations,
soon revealed itself as emptied and strengthless; whoever
lagged behind, didn't command even the means he had used
until the night before. It was the living critics, and not
the chronological contiguity, that connected the different
artistic practices with each other. Their content of truth
was melted in their dialectic content. They wanted to climb
their
emotions,
"suffering higher", as the romantics would have
said, and this "higher" came true in the same context
where the forms turned into flesh and blood. In tango and
in life, history
also rules over the works that deny it. So, every true creation
wipes out whatever cannot reach its new standard
and, in the same time, offers itself as a further choice,
as a scandal or a snag stone. If we want, we can integrate
it into ourselves or fight with it and squeeze all its truth
out of it. On the other hand, the tango asks nothing but
to die into us, become us, make us in its own image and
likeness. It strives for representing the world's complexity
every three minutes; its lowest point of view is totality.
On the contrary, the today's nominalistic exasperation for
a super private parole, the mouldering of experience,
the inexpugnable abuse of the monadic styles, are accepted
only thanks to some ideological bonds that exclude verification
a priori. They make us understand the incomprehensible,
digest the indigestible and partecipate to the uncommunicable.
The milonga collective body has not been taking
part to anything for quite a while. Now, it merely aknowledges
an extra-territorial tango, which is made elsewhere and whose
major worry is the marketing. A tango born not in the baile's
living body, but in undefined laboratories, or in the ballroom
shows
where, all bursting into capitals, it tries to convince
about the quality of the goods that will put on sale in the
next day workshop. A tango that's got something to do
with catalogues, publicity, window-dressing; a tango do-it-yourself,
that can be dismantled; a tango you can buy the
elements, the spare parts, the upgrades of. Aesthetic earmark
of the widened production and its promise for not reduced
wealth, the tango nuevo has got the submission to
the market written all over its face. It's not possible to
criticize its ideas without hurting its economic interests.
It regards itself as a castle among the others in a feudal
system, or as a volcano's side crater originated by the
occlusion of the main. It doesn't lay claims of totality,
it would rather come down to be a subgenre like the western
or the detective story. While its initiates refrain
from artistic procedures they ignore the existence of, the
tango is crashing down under the weight of weight subtraction:
every semplification, every decrease of complexity
surrenders it to the world's disenchantment, whereas, since Kant, the art is
true only when it doesn't suits this world. But the nuevistas are
suitable indeed: all dappled and delighted, they adapt their
tango to the beat, to the fashions, even to the shoes of
today, borrowing their terms from the club-culture and their
customers from the happy hours' evening Mass. Enemies of
style and lacking in form, they
think these are a fault and a handicap. Ideal background
for their shapeless productions is the electrotango's electronic
wallpaper, which is a new landlord's
choice, actually. Although widely supported by the institutions
and praised by the tango-entertainment managers, they try
all the same to cover up the tracks of their shortcuts, like
the killers do in their crimes, so as their devices could
look like improvisations and their compromises be mistaken
for experiments by an audience who is mostly based on beginners.
In this embrassons-nous with the status quo, the
tango nuevo pulls down and deceives the embrace
itself, or what's left in it of its dream of glorious body.
Like in a marriage of convenience, two viveurs who have perfectly
learned the cynical lesson of the world, link together in
the new embrace, without looking or wishing for each other.
Two strangers, no matter if dancers or lovers, who shine
with the pinchbeck glamour of the modern social pantograph's
arms that move them, exploit them
of their meaning and, in the same time, use them for the
machine's enhancement. Many years ago, old man Adorno
has taught us that, in the cultural business age, the new
is a non-judging judgment whose truth is in its non-intentional
element. Perhaps, this should be enough to prove that the
intentional name of nuevo, defines
by contrast a tango which is not true, and consequently not
new either.
© Jean Fajean
Milano, 2006
english translation by Marco Castellani
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