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.
