Playing the ‘Joyful Return’: Machine-Music, Detroit Techno and the Thrill of Repetition
Can the logic of industrial production be turned against itself on the terrain of culture? Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School argues it cannot: the shape of popular culture is dictated by the system in order to reproduce itself. The newly emergent ‘culture industry’ that Adorno observed in the mid 2oth century stood for ‘the automatic self-reproduction of the status quo’. Mass-produced artworks are ‘predigested’ commodities which mirror the drudgery of labour and keep workers in a state of distraction. The dehumanising force of capitalism has colonised human subjectivity to such an extent that ‘what happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time’.
New forms of music, to Adorno, no longer captured an authentic portrait of human experience, but the ‘disintegration of life and ‘the alienated state of consciousness’ under consumer capitalism. Associating it with the insidious power of advertising, Adorno identified an ‘authoritarian repetition’ in modern music, a ‘stomping and hammering’ which teaches the listener to obey and ‘submit’. Adorno echoes Sigmund Freud when dismissing ‘infantile compositions’ which ‘exhibit the delirious and confining gesture of chasing one’s tail’.
The founder of psychoanalysis famously theorised repetition by studying an infant who made a game of throwing their toy away and reeling it back in with delight. First the child exclaimed (with dismay) ‘Fort’ and then (happily) ‘Da’ - literally ‘Gone’ / ‘There’ in German. This game was a recognition that ‘departure must be played as the necessary prelude to the joyful return’, and, by restaging separation from their mother, marked the child’s attempt to ‘obtain the mastery of a situation’. This is repetition as practice, learning and reinforcement. Later when observing shell-shocked soldiers haunted by nightmares, Freud differentiated between this liberating process and a ‘repetition-compulsion’ which revives repressed past experiences that ’contain no potentiality of pleasure’. Freud relates this seemingly illogical force to a death-drive, a ‘tendency towards inertia in organic life’ directed towards the ‘reinstatement of an earlier condition’.
This self-destructive instinct struggles against ‘external disturbing forces’ and forces a retreat into loops, away from the shocks and tensions of life’s linear trajectory. It’s this idea of regression through repetition which animates Adorno’s disdain for popular culture. As the 1970s faded, bold new forms of repetitive music tackled the alienation of modern technological existence, with sounds sprung from the factories of Dusseldorf and Detroit. On records like The Man-Machine and Trans-Europe Express, Kraftwerk used synthesisers to make electronic pop that was austere, yet innovative and futuristic. Through their disaffected, robotic presentation, Kraftwerk toyed with stereotypes of Germanic discipline; ‘we go beyond all this individual feel’ said the band, ‘we are more like vehicles, part of our man-machine’.
As America’s Motor City crumbled amid rapid globalisation, its inhabitants had their own reckoning with industrial modernity. Built around repetitive synth arpeggios and sparse looping rhythms, Detroit techno was the music of the future. The city’s slick Motown sound, reflected pioneer Juan Atkins, was built on the ‘same principles as the conveyor belt system at Ford’ but ‘today their plants don't work that way - they use robots and computers to make the cars’. These robots loom large in Detroit techno. What African-American musicians appreciated through Kraftwerk's use of the robot, Tricia Rose argues, was an ‘understanding of themselves as already having been robots’; they had long been ‘labor for capitalism’, with ‘very little value as people in this society’. Being a dehumanised cog in a machine was not new, and in ‘playing’ with the robotic stance, perhaps ‘you could master the wearing of this guise in order to use it against your interpolation. This idea was at the heart of the nascent Afrofuturist movement, which rejected nostalgia to imagine utopian, technological futures.
This subversive embrace of technology elides Adorno’s fatalistic and Eurocentric account of machinic alienation. Detroit techno was related to the stilted sound of early Kraftwerk, but these machines could move. Working in the group Cybotron, Atkins blended propulsive synths and vocoder effects with an unmistakable funk bassline, and with 1982’s seminal ‘Clear’ created the template for all club-ready techno to come. Amid the cerebral sci-fi concepts and mechanical sounds, this music was distinct from the cold rationality of industrial production, it was something to dance to, to feel. While progenitors like Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson (‘The Belleville Three’) took a visionary approach to technology, the product was far from pure hedonism. Greg Sharzer identifies ‘machine-like repetition’ as the defining trait of Detroit techno, which in its ‘unrelenting and unstopping rhythms refuses the listener the emotional catharsis of trance or house’. In space, no-one can hear diva vocals scream.
Contrary to Adorno’s fear of music built around standardised patterns leading to the ‘self-suppression of the subject’ and ‘conditioned reflexes’, Detroit techno cannot be easily processed precisely because of its lack of subjective expression and narrative. The listener must engage in interpretation. Repetition in techno, Barrett Watten argues, complicates meaning ‘by virtue of its suspension of intention’, it must be ‘heard in a different way’ than music with discernible authorial consciousness. Severing the link between agency and affect, techno operates like a Turing test: asking us ‘whom or what are we listening to?’. What is human and what is machine? Which came first and which do we end up with? This indeterminate negotiation between the human and robotic doesn’t mark a regression into the unconscious nor surrender the monotony of labour, but the generation of new cyborg subjectivities.
Techno highlights our imbrication in technology and, in so doing, sharpens awareness of our humanity. It invites us to consider our own agency and ask what is controlled in other parts of our lives. In the mythos of Detroit’s most subversive figureheads like Underground Resistance and Drexciya, the ‘programmers’ are always the antagonist.
Techno records are replete with references to nefarious forces, surveillance and capitalist exploitation. Amid the economic collapse of Detroit, these producers understood that industrial modernity was no guarantee of prosperity for all.
Through such themes, Robert Pope argues, techno ‘warns of our technological future—a future which is felt, according to a dystopian outlook, to be already, irrevocably, here’. Yet at the same time, techno enacts a confrontation with this future, it repurposes the machinic sounds of production in a defiant act best understood as sabotage, or salvage. It conjures something visceral out of the circuitry.
This uneasy flitting between dystopia and utopia is what differentiates techno in the Detroit tradition from its many variants and other electronic genres. As we dance to this music, Pope writes, we are ‘always-already surviving this dystopian situation’, asserting our post-humanity and glitching the matrix. These are speculative, otherworldly tunes which never lose sight of their own shadow: utopian dread or dystopian joy. Reflecting on the first new Cybotron EP in 28 years, DeForrest Brown Jr. recently wrote that techno’s true purpose was to ‘help society survive our collision with a universally felt “future shock” by inserting an audio virus into the cultural matrix’.
In other words, the Gibsonian future has arrived, and the task of techno is to evenly distribute it. Unlike the marketable conformity of so-called ‘business techno’, the DIY ethos of the Detroit tradition elides the ‘whole package’ requisite for mainstream success. The function of this machine-music was to transcend the limits of identity: race, class, nationality or gender (though it’s worth noting the original scene was overwhelmingly male). Detroit artists fiercely rejected superficial, commercial concerns and some, like Gerald Donald and UR’s ‘Mad’ Mike Banks, stayed incognito. Banks explained: ‘there was no reason for you to know what we look like, you just concentrate more on what the sound was’. Instead of ‘pleading for inclusion and integration’, Kodwo Eshun writes, techno ‘secedes from the logic of empowerment which underpins the entire American mediascape: from all those directives to become visible, to assume your voice, to tell your story’. As 1980s neoliberalism dissolved the bonds of social solidarity in favour of the individual, Detroit techno slipped the straitjacket.
This refusal has newfound potency in our present data-driven society, which compels us to cultivate uniqueness and constantly perform our identity. Today’s spiritual successors to the Belleville Three – artists like Helena Hauff, DJ Stingray and The Exaltics – are still working with the same antiquated Roland machines on imperfect, analog compositions. Their looping melodies short-circuit the algorithmic emotion-compulsion which defines so much popular music today. Meaning can be grasped at but remains elusive, not hammered home through coercive cues. The music, in Eshun’s terms, ‘repels designation’, evades capture from the ‘Turing identicops stationed in your head’.
These circular rhythms are a reprieve from the linear narrative of ourselves which must always be under construction. Techno does not represent Adorno’s fear of subjectivity lost in the gears of machines, but an intrepid expression of humanity through technology. Making and performing music with drum machines, Jeff Mills has reflected, is about trying to ‘regain some of the humanness’.
Each time the DJ on stage flicks a switch and brings the kick-drum back to the track, the rapturous crowd are experiencing none other than the ‘joyful return’ of the Fort / Da game, the return of humanness. This thrill of repetition doesn’t signify a regressive flight from life’s unceasing shocks, but a tuning into its natural rhythms and affirmation of its constant loops: the 808 heartbeat, the hi-hat pulse.
Works cited
Adorno, Theodor, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. Jay Bernstein, (1991).
Adorno, Theodor, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (2007).
Brown Jr., DeForrest, Maintain The Golden Ratio | Cybotron | Tresor Records (bandcamp.com) (2023).
Dery, Mark, "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Gred Tate and Tricia
Rose" in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (1994).
Eshun, Kodwo, More brilliant than the sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction (1998).
Fisher, Mark, ‘Cover Interview with Mike Banks’, The Wire (November 2007).
Freud, Sigmund, Modern Classics: Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, trans. John Reddick (2003).
Pope, Robert, “Hooked on An Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture”, Dancecult 2 (2011).
Reynolds, Simon, How Florian Schneider And Kraftwerk Created Pop's Future : NPR, NPR (2020)
Sharzer, Greg, Late Escapism and Contemporary Neoliberalism: Alienation, Work and Utopia (2022).
Trinchero, Stefania, ‘Interview with Jeff Mills’, Monument (November 2019).
Watten, Barrett, “The Constructivist Moment: From El Lissitzsky to Detroit Techno”, Qui Parle 11 (1997).
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Images: Ken Collier schools a young Detroit crowd in 1981 by Todd Johnson (thumbnail), Park Avenue Club by Todd Johnson, The Belleville Three by Matthew Vosbergh