The idea of the Plundering Žižek/Silent Disco night in June ‘curated’ by Sound and Music was that the performers and the audience plundered what the artists, the composers, had produced, disrupting the straightforward process of as simply serving up what the audience wants.

The audience had headphones with two different channels, so were free to fabricate our own version of Federico Reuben’s E-tudes, consisting of the sixth book of 16th Century madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa, and a selection of ‘e-tudes’ from the piano repertoire. Half of the six pianocircus pianists, for their part, were able to select the pieces they wanted to play.

As a listener, however, I was loathe to disrupt the continuation of a mostly melodic piece rather than a cacophonous merger of sound. The second channel, at times, simply offered white noise, so our freedom was not absolute.

This was more an illusion of activity, with the audience taking a distinctly passive pose, many sprawled over the floor, like they were in the dance tent of a festival when the chill-out tunes were on.

More music by Reuben, performed on laptop, bass, drums and piano, was designed to provide a live, alternative soundtrack to the 2005 Žižek! movie. But the hints of chaos,  were, again, no disruption to the continuation of the film, a film that myself, and the rest of the audience, dutifully swivelled round to watch, agape.

Žižek himself offers a disruption to the culture as something easy, something we can adopt a reclined posture to, popping up on U.S talk shows and other unlikely places, and deconstructing the plot of the new Star Wars trilogy.

A disruption that, at times, simply seems like incongruity, but is arguably essentially complicity with the system that is unbecoming of a Marxist theorist – writing, for example, for an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. A drum roll from bass player Javier Carmona was there to confirm what Žižek was saying, rather than to compete or deny it: underlining, for instance, Žižek’s criticism of Lacan’s ridiculous emphasis.

This was not, however, as pointless a gesture as Cory Arcangel’s ‘hands on’ intervention for the next piece, which simply involved Arcangel trying to obscure Paul Simon whenever he appeared on a screen.

Or, indeed, the films of David Blandy we were shown, which made the obvious point that the self is a performer, and that white people sometimes like to pretend that they’re black.

For the most part, far from being active plunderers, we were prostrate and prone, but, for the most part, in pleasure, not pain. During both Duncan MacLeod’s Ellipsis and, particularly, Colin Riley’s Recast there was a collective closing of eyes and feeling of a kind of ecstasy. “The spell cast by the music might actually be true,” as the programme said, and not simply a ritual we do not believe in, as Žižek has suggested.

Ellipsis was a multi-layered complex interweaving of sounds that required you to listen intently; Recast, with live electronics by Paul Fretwell, was simply shimmering and satisfying, music that made you want to be quiet and still.