* Georges Bataille in conversation with Marguerite Duras in Georges Bataille, Die Aufgaben des Geistes: Gespräche und Interviews 1948-1961 (Berlin: Bearbeitung, Übersetzung von Rita Bischof, 2012), 75, my translation. ** https://www.comatonse.com/writings/2017_deproduction.html.

Never speaking truth to power is a rare conviction. It disfigures the basis of what is called being political by understanding the space of politics as framed by violence and confronting it with a fundamental attitude of noncompliance. A commitment akin maybe to George Bataille's characterization of his anti-fascist praxis as actively "not taking responsibility for the world in any sense whatsoever."^* Taking responsibility against the world, however, disqualifies you from any kind of popularity contest. Not just metaphorically speaking, but also literally: you will not be popular. But what you might choose to be instead-and what both Bataille was in his clandestine anti-fascism of the 1930s, and what Terre Thaemlitz, who in her work Deproduction (2017) proposes to never speak truth to power, chooses to be-is communal: dedicated to delivering oneself to those communities and communions for whom the experience of the violence of the political is a daily and nightly given. Not perceived as framing reality, but constituting it. If we, with Thaemlitz, account for the fact that "transsexual access to medical care has historically gone hand in hand with a formal diagnosis of gender identity disorder (GID)," then what is diagnosed as dysphoria gives a name to its systemic violence, an "absence of non-binary gender options."^** Thaemlitz registers that the sexes we inhabit as she and he-altering her gender leanings in yearly and in contextual patterns-and the sounds and music we wish to lose ourselves in, the narratives we tell of ourselves, the theories we frame to make sense, and even the communions we inhabit, are mastered in their material lives by the presence of such constitutive violences. Since the late 1980s, Terre Thaemlitz has dedicated her work to un-mastering them.

1 https://www.comatonse.com/releases/c022.html.

In Thaemlitz's recent retrospective Reframed Positions at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Germany, which included three satellite events in Berlin-a staging of Deproduction at Callie's, a conversation with Lawrence English at Volksbühne, and a gig as DJ Sprinkles at Panoramabar in Berghain-her workings were presented as an ongoing publication of impossible atmospheres. In Lüneburg, early works, for instance small interventions like Unauthorized Installation of Beeping Devices at MoMA (1989), produced in collaboration with John Consigli, added covertly to the ambient noises of the museum building's infrastructure, and the MTV-commissioned but never-aired Silent Passability (Ride to the Countryside) (1997) was shown alongside later video works like Soulnessless (2012) and Lovebomb (2005), which were also produced as record releases through Thaemlitz's label, Comatonse Recordings, boxed with her extensive writings on the subject. This multi-mediatic dynamic expanded continuously in different configurations and directions. In DJ Sprinkles's set at Berghain, which included passages from her 2008 album Midtown 120 Blues, transmitting the erasure of what deep house arose from, the "sexual and gender crises, transgendered sex work, black market hormones, drug and alcohol addiction, loneliness, racism, HIV, ACT-UP, Thompkins Sq. Park, police brutality, queer-bashing, underpayment, unemployment and censorship-all at 120 beats per minute," she worked hard not to let anyone forget that "house isn't so much a sound as a situation" and "is hyperspecific."¹ After her set, we all left the premises because the situation of that specific club became unreal to the point where we were literally asking one another: What are we pretending now? We didn't find a satisfying answer. This is when the word "ambient" became very figural for me.

2 https://www.comatonse.com/releases/c022.html. 3 The video ends on this text, appearing in written form on the screen. 4 This is part of the text appearing in written form-always in both English and Japanese in the video.

Thaemlitz relays that MTV did not air Silent Passability because it was deemed "too ambient for broadcasting."² The four-minute-long video consists of footage of drag performances-beautiful, flickering, repeating slow-motion close-ups, often centered on faces-shot in an upstate New York bar to which the scene had been displaced after being brutally evicted from Midtown. The music moves with its subjects, a loop of a melodic sequence, descending into stuttering and momentary arrest, noise, and back to melodic repetition "starring Aggie Dune, Heather Skye, Darienne Lake, Lady Jane Fairchild, Pandora Box. Dedicated to those who risk their lives to challenge gender bias and homophobia."³ It was Thaemlitz's first video. MTV was probably missing a narrative plot in Thaemlitz's hyperspecificity that was, and remains, ambient. It registers each atmosphere by its material makings, quotes them audibly into it, disfigures the hierarchies that turn them into a plot, and instead of offering intentionalities, engulfs us in an overabundance of consequences in which narratives of self-realization appear as both violent and violated. Thaemlitz released the video as part of the collection Interstices (2001), with an audio track that narrates instances of her and others traveling between safe zones, captured between the dangers of passing and those of not passing (the two basic gender options allowed within heterosexist normalcy). In the same box she released Interstices and Lovebomb, videos and music following those same threads into the white-supremacist history of Springfield, Minnesota, the town she grew up in, her own history of being bullied and attacked, the medical and familial brutalization of intersex children and the colonial core of love songs. "Writing a love song typically begins where it hopes to end,"⁴ and within the ambience of our present and its past, no beginning is ever good. In all these video works, Thaemlitz returns again and again to distorting musical quotes as well as text passages in written and audible form (almost) to the point of their unknowability: recognizable wordage is cut short or replaced, voices are overlayered by interstitial noise. But there is never silence. It is replaced by a constant reminder of what is made noncommunicable, an ambience of muted experiences.

And so Thaemlitz is never really isolating her individual works but keeps perpetuating them into complete surroundings of media, videos, writing, performances, posters she designed as part of educational outreach, such as her manual HIV/AIDS 101 (1993), and her work as a producer and DJ. Between them, there is love, pleasure, beauty, and communion. They just never come to us released from their ambience.

In the retrospective in Lüneburg, all of these works were present, as was Soulnessless, the video accompanying the thirty-two-hour MP3 album of the same title, giving space to Thaemlitz's decidedly low-fi substitution of aesthetic immersion with confrontational ambience. The exhibition, curated by Elisa R. Linn and Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff together with Thaemlitz's long-term collaborator Lawrence English, thus was a case of neither fan fiction nor critical evaluation. It approximated Thaemlitz's own proceedings, and offered a rare understanding of her relationship to the arts she employs as much as one of her work. Reframed Positions was dedicated not to tracing back Thaemlitz's development, but rather, or so it seemed, to positing that there is no development in her work. Simply because there cannot be. As long as what Thaemlitz faces head-on-the heterosexist brutalization of sex under the stately auspices of the Christian family model and its white supremacist globalization-thrives, she will un-master its ambience. Confrontational ambient.

5 http://non.com.co/info. 6 http://non.com.co/trilogy/. 7 See Terre Thaemlitz: Give Up on Hopes and Dreams, produced by Patrick Nation for Resident Advisor 2021. Participants were 辻愛子 / Tsuji Aiko, Dont Rhine, 吉田泉 / Izumi Yoshida, Laurence Rassel, Mark Fell, and Terre Thaemlitz. Available at https://ra.co/films/3876.

The first time I registered a confrontational use of ambient sound was when I learned about NON Worldwide in 2017: an expansive collective of musicians and producers from Africa and the worldwide African diaspora, founded by Angel-Ho, Nkisi, and Chino Amobi, committed to ambient as a needed form to undo the ambience of ongoing colonization. As they wrote in a quarterly: "You have only had politics. . . . These insipid polite songs you listen to them for a while and they become dull. With a NON song you can listen to it forever."⁵ Listening to some of their releases, it felt like you not only can, but actually should.⁶ You find the "reversion of reception" in Thaemlitz's dealings with music, too. Her workings are also grounded in being hyperspecific about her identity, an American in Japan, breaking the colonial family and its Christian sexes out of herself, and out of us. Confrontational ambient. Background is never neutral. Thaemlitz's work, like that of NON, does not so much search for allies as attract accomplices. In a Resident Advisor documentary dedicated to Thaemlitz, she deflects the format by sharing it with five such accomplices, each of them bringing materials to discuss what one of them, Dont Rhine from Ultra Red, terms "working in the ambient genre." Thaemlitz here spells out what it takes to be an accomplice: an understanding of collaboration not as a "joining of minds" but as welcoming the "infectious impact" of "exposing oneself to a social antibody."⁷ I love that.

at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg from May 11 to July 16, 2023

Kerstin Stakemeier is an educator at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and a writer who mostly works in collaboration. In 2021, the exhibition Illiberal Arts, conceived with Anselm Franke, opened at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin; in spring 2023 its second iteration opened under the title Illiberal Lives at Stiftung Moderne Kunst Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany. With Bill Dietz, Stakemeier realized Universal Receptivity (2021); with M. Ammer, E. Birkenstock, J. Nachtigall, and S. Weber she organized and edited the exhibition series and journal Class Languages (2017-18); and with Marina Vishmidt she wrote Reproducing Autonomy (2016). Stakemeier is currently working on a second book.