Robert Fink, UCLA musicologist, calls the late 20th century the "Culture of Repetition", ably reviewed at Amsteg. Now, however, we are leaving this phase - though the traits that he hallmarks as part of it will be with us for some time. The whole book is published by the University of California Press.

Instead we are now in the culture of "depetition". What does this mean? In English we create words out of bases and prefixes. repeat is very old in English, and petition a perfectly good base. We engage in repetition when we entreat, attack or ask again. We are depeating when we fall from a goal, or ask to give back what we prayed for.

Robert Fink names his two large parts after eros - the Greek for erotic desire, and thanatos, the word for death. Sex and death being a very potent, and time honoured, musical cocktail - first one experiences Sehnsucht, and then having consumated, one dies. The thanatic impulse - yes, thanatic is a word that has been used before - is embedded in the sexual impulse physically, and also culturally. Violence arouses hormones which can be turned to other ends, as erotic attachment arouses the desire to kill rivals and threats to the union, real or imagined.

The culture of repetition, in his argument uses music to stimulate and simulate desire through satiating repetition, and a kind of deathly state which he calls "mood regulation". This culture Fink locates in the mid 1970's:

During the spring, summer, and fall of 1976, a radically new type of musical experience— strictly- patterned, tonally-static, beat-driven—insinuated its way into the mainstream of Western music culture. Opportunities to respond with the whole body to extremely long, extremely loud stretches of repetitious music had been available at the Downtown margins since the late 1960s—either live in the galleries and loft spaces of the experimental avant-garde, or blasting from unlabeled 12-inch records over the sweaty dance floors of what were just beginning to be called “discos.” But in that Bicentennial year the new repetition-driven sound went Uptown, into the concert halls of the classical Establishment and onto the top-forty radio playlists of the pop conglomerates.

It was the year of minimalism and disco. How could you miss it?

But was it radically new? Really? Repetition is part of musical culture irreducibly. At a scale every two seconds, two hours a day, seven days a week, a pianist will rack up millions of scales over the course of a long performing career. Wagner open's his ring cycle with music which is, in all of its particulars, minimalist - harmonically static, triadically stable, and driven by conflicting rhythmic impulses. Chanting and other forms of repetition as music were hardly new - and extended dance performance is found in the culture of the baroque.

However, he is right that the culture of repetition takes on a different meaning when there are machines that can produce varied texture of repetition that satisfies human needs. No longer limited to the clock or peel of bells, the late 20th century could do more than reproduce a human generated sound, it could transfigure it.

The culture of repetition goes beyond music - and into art, fashion and experience itself. Repetition becomes the culture of statistics when repetitions are set off from each other by increments not bound to the repeated actions themselves. "That," said Mahler of a street scene, "is counterpoint!"

Iraq is the war of the culture of repetition - we have so often had wars of instant gratification - the Falklands, Grenada, Panama, the First Iraq War, Afghanistan - that another seemed just what was required to satiate a population. "Gain!" cry the teletubbies. "Gain!" Like "Om" the invocation of a godhead has been reduced to a syllable.

Which brings me to the culture of depetition. It is not yet to a single syllable, but it is to a phrase "Move on." "I've moved on." What ever the erotic desire was that was floridly brought out by repetition, depetition has set in as soon as "move on" is uttered. It is not a thanatic impulse, quite the contrary, it is the willingness to chew an emotional appendage off to escape the consequences. Some relationships are just "Coyote Ugly" - a phrase that has been hanging around for decades now.

In the novel Dune Herbert's quasi-mystical political eugenics conspiracy the Bene Gesserit, have a test where an individual is subjected to pain, and if they withdraw from it, they are killed as being "an animal". The American society of the present would not only flunk this test, it would institute the reverse one - someone stupid enough to suffer the pain to the end would be dispatched as being a threat to themselves and others.

There is a certain logic to depetition, a logic which the present involvement in Iraq shows - people living in a culture of instant gratificatin will often jump at openings which turn out, on inspection, to be wretchedly bad ideas. There is so much to process, and it is so easy to withhold the key detail. Depetition is the compromise between consumerism and consideration.

Depetition is not inevitably linked to regret, in fact, it is often not linked to regret, so that a person is free to jump at the next chance for gratification. To depeat is to hope for a chance to repeat. By avoiding the seering self-judgementalism of regret, the depeator assigns blame to the illusion, and not the delusion. To the circumstances and incomplete information. This is not always inaccurate, often there is inadequeate information, often the truth is intentionally withheld. What is lazy abnegation of responsibility for one person, could be realistic appraisal for another.

At the root of the difference is not a particular chance, but the culture in which pre-repetitive desire is dangled in front of people - the chance for it to be the Summer of '76 again and again. Some people are trapped in it by self and circumstance, other's manipulate it. As long as there are false choices, then people must either rebel, or depeat. The question is what to do with those who presented the false choices.

Consider the current attempt by various neo-cons to sneak out of responsibility. They can't say that they didn't know about the lack of WMD - since they manufactured the faked evidence. Instead, they must pretend that they didn't know how incompetent Bush was. It is hilariously funny to watch a group of people who created a Churchill fetish to explain the war - comparing Saddam to Hilter with seriousness - explain away disaster. Churchill went to the front lines after Gallipoli - the neocons are sipping lattes in their conference rooms. A guerilla merges with the population, a high depeator does the same - pretending to be Joe Truck Driver, who had no choice but to speed while dead tired because he had his orders and didn't know that the hitch was bad.

The culture of depetition is on display, however, when no one on the air calls them on this. When this is as good an excuse as any. In essence "How could we know the incompetent buffoon that we put in place to have impeachment insurance would be an impeachable incompetent buffoon?" The illogic of the position can only work so long as people look at the neocons and see their own depetition - that the deal is that for America to chew off the arm that went to Iraq comes at the price of allowing the neocons to do the same.

Keep gnawing John McCain. Keep gnawing.