Tweaks

Seriously, guys, tweaks are alot different from modifications, and it is worth speculating on their differences. One can easily see how the tweak enables many audiophiles to obey the Law of their Warranty (not to tamper with their component) while following their desire to somehow change the performance of their system in a sometimes obsessive way. From this perspective, the tweaker's literal obedience to the Law cannot but appear as the ultimate opportunistic manipulation, and even as a false relation to the intents of the designer of a component since a tweak implies a totally external relationship towards the component as a set of variables to be, well, tweaked, so that one can achieve one's own true aim, not the designer's. What bothers many DIYers and technicians who actually "modify" or "alter" their components about tweakers is probably the fact that the tweakers do not see the cheap trickery of their procedure, so that when they succeed in having their cake and eating it, in realizing their goal without disobeying the letter of their Warranty, they do not feel the need to go further and get their hands dirty by getting more serious.

Last time I counted, Slawney was on 52 Vibrapods (from #1 to #5) and about 24 spikes. But there are also air suspension systems tucked here and there. It was on the latter that he started to think of "tweaks" as inseparable from the so-called "consumer society," and the reign of generalized perversion in late capitalism, where people are weekly interested in gadgets and devices which not only allow them to live with their perversion, but even directly conjure up new perversions. Recall, in the sexual domain proper, all the gadgets invented to bring diversity and new excitement into sexual lives, from lotions that should enhance potency and pleasures to different outfits and instruments (rings, provocative dresses, whips and chains, vibrators, and other artificial prosthetic organs, not to mention pornography and other direct stimulators of the mind): they do not simply incite the "natural" sexual desire, they supplement it, giving it an irreducible, "perverse," excessive and derailed, twist. Tweaks--all this (often ineffective and repetitive) proliferation of audio gadgets--render most directly the "sex toy" in the world of audiophilia. Therein lies the entire libidinal economy of high-end audio consumption: in the production of objects which do not simply meet or satisfy an already given need, but create the need they claim to satisfy (the publicity for some tweaks actually operates in such a way that the consumer "becomes aware of dimensions of their audio system that there were not even aware they possessed"). Which is why these objects are no longer (as in the 1970s) contrained to the natural series of speaker, amp, turntable, but comprise the proliferating and increasingly autonomous (tweaks for tweaks!) market for a multitude of electro-mechanical audio sublimation, which, however, is correlative to a certain lack--the excessive consumption of "tweaks" functions as the reaction to a certain fundamental lack. Crucial here is the assymmetrical relation of lack and excess: the proliferation of "tweaks" generates a surplus-enjoyment which fills in the lack of enjoyment in one's system as it is "in the nude," and although these "tweaks" never provide the thing itself, although they are supplements which always fall short of full enjoyment, they are nonetheless experienced as excessive, as surplus-enjoyment--in short, in "tweaks," the falling-short of a system, the not enough, coincides with the excess of a system. Speculative as these propositions sound, they do render some audiophile's experience when they have recourse to the innumerable audio gadgets on the market: they are in excess of the basic system, they endeavor to give an additional "perverse" twist to out listening activity, yet, simultaneously, they are pale shadows that somehow lack the substantial density of the Real Thing.