textfiles-politics/politicalTextFiles/beverley.txt

        THE IDEOLOGY OF POSTMODERN MUSIC AND LEFT POLITICS

                                by

                          JOHN BEVERLEY

                     University of Pittsburgh
      Copyright (c) 1989 by _Critical Quarterly_, all rights
               reserved.  Reprinted by permission.

     ------------------------------------------------------
     This article appeared initially in the British journal
     _Critical Quarterly_ 31.1 (Spring, 1989).  I'm grateful
     to its editors for permission to reproduce it here, and
     in particular to Colin MacCabe for suggesting the idea 
     in the first place.  I've added a few minor corrections
     and updates.
     ------------------------------------------------------


                        for Rudy Van Gelder, friend of ears


[1]       Adorno directed some of his most acid remarks on

     musical sociology to the category of the "fan."  For

     example:

          What is common to the jazz enthusiast of all

          countries, however, is the moment of compliance,

          in parodistic exaggeration.  In this respect their

          play recalls the brutal seriousness of the masses

          of followers in totalitarian states, even though

          the difference between play and seriousness

          amounts to that between life and death  (...)

          While the leaders in the European dictatorships of

          both shades raged against the decadence of jazz,

          the youth of the other countries has long since

          allowed itself to be electrified, as with marches,

          by the syncopated dance-steps, with bands which do

          not by accident stem from military music.^1^

     One of the most important contributions of

     postmodernism has been its defense of an aesthetics of

     the _consumer_, rather than as in the case of

     romanticism and modernism an aesthetics of the

     producer, in turn linked to an individualist and

     phallocentric ego ideal.  I should first of all make it

     clear then that I am writing here from the perspective

     of the "fan," the person who buys records and goes to

     concerts, not like Adorno from the perspective of the

     trained musician or composer.  What I will be arguing,

     in part with Adorno, in part against him, is that music

     is coming to represent for the Left something like a

     "key sector."


                       * * * * * * * * *


[2]       For Adorno, the development of modern music is a

     reflection of the decline of the bourgeoisie, whose

     most characteristic cultural medium on the other hand

     music is.^2^  Christa Burger recalls the essential

     image of the cultural in Adorno: that of Ulysses, who,

     tied to the mast of his ship, can listen to the song

     of the sirens while the slaves underneath work at the

     oars, cut off from the aesthetic experience which is

     reserved only for those in power.^3^  What is implied

     and critiqued at the same time in the image is the

     stance of the traditional intellectual or aesthete in

     the face of the processes of transformation of culture

     into a commodity--mass culture--and the consequent

     collapse of the distinction between high and low

     culture, a collapse which precisely defines the

     postmodern and which postmodernist ideology celebrates.

     In the postmodern mode, not only are Ulysses and his

     crew both listening to the siren song, they are singing

     along with it as in "Sing Along with Mitch" and perhaps

     marking the beat with their oars--one-two, one-two,

     one-two-three-four.


                         * * * * * * * *


[3]       One variant of the ideology of postmodern music

     may be illustrated by the following remarks from an

     interview John Cage gave about his composition for

     electronic tape _Fontana Mix_ (1958):

          Q.--I feel that there is a sense of logic and

          cohesion in your indeterminate music.

          A.--This logic was not put there by me, but was

          the result of chance operations.  The thought that

          it is logical grows up in you... I think that all

          those things that we associate with logic and our

          observance of relationships, those aspects of our

          mind are extremely simple in relation to what

          actually happens, so that when we use our

          perception of logic we minimize the actual nature

          of the thing we are experiencing.

          Q.--Your conception (of indeterminacy) leads you

          into a universe nobody has attempted to charter

          before.  Do you find yourself in it as a lawmaker?

          A.--I am certainly not at the point of making

          laws.  I am more like a hunter, or an inventor,

          than a lawmaker.

          Q.--Are you satisfied with the way your music is

          made public--that is, by the music publishers,

          record companies, radio stations, etc.?  Do you

          have complaints?

          A.--I consider my music, once it has left my desk,

          to be what in Buddhism would be called a non-

          sentient being...  If someone kicked me--not my

          music, but me--then I might complain.  But if they

          kicked my music, or cut it out, or don't play it

          enough, or too much, or something like that, then

          who am I to complain?^4^

     We might contrast this with one of the great epiphanies

     of literary modernism, the moment of the jazz song in

     Sartre's _Nausea_:

          (...)there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of

          tiny jolts.  They know no rest, an inflexible

          order gives birth to them and destroys them

          without even giving them time to recuperate and

          exist for themselves.  They race, they press

          forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing

          and are obliterated.  I would like to hold them

          back, but I know if I succeeded in stopping one it

          would remain between my fingers only as a raffish

          languishing sound.  I must accept their death; I

          must even _will_ it: I know few impressions

          stronger or more harsh.

               I grow warm, I begin to feel happy.  There is

          nothing extraordinary in this, it is a small

          happiness of Nausea: it spreads at the bottom of

          the viscous puddle, at the bottom of _our_ time--

          the time of purple suspenders and broken chair

          seats; it is made of wide, soft instants,

          spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.  No

          sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as

          though I have known it for twenty years (...)

               The last chord has died away.  In the brief

          silence which follows I feel strongly that there

          it is, that _something has happened_.

               Silence.

                         _Some of these days

                         You'll miss me honey_

               What has just happened is that the Nausea has

          disappeared.  When the voice was heard in the

          silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea

          vanish.  Suddenly: it was almost unbearable to

          become so hard, so brilliant.  At the same time

          the music was drawn out, dilated, swelled like a

          waterspout.  It filled the room with its metallic

          transparency, crushing our miserable time against

          the walls.  I am _in_ the music.  Globes of fire

          turn in the mirrors; encircled by rings of smoke,

          veiling and unveiling the hard smile of light.  My

          glass of beer has shrunk, it seems heaped up on

          the table, it looks dense and indispensable.  I

          want to pick it up and feel the weight of it, I

          stretch out my hand...  God!  That is what has

          changed, my gestures.  This movement of my arm has

          developed like a majestic theme, it has glided

          along the jazz song; I seemed to be dancing.^5^


                         * * * * * * * *


[4]       The passage from _Nausea_ illustrates Adorno's

     dictum that music is "the promise of reconciliation."

     This is what betrays its origins in those moments of

     ritual sacrifice and celebration in which the members

     of a human community are bonded or rebonded to their

     places within it.  In _Nausea_ the jazz song prefigures

     Roquentin's eventual reconciliation with his own self

     and his decision to write what is in effect his

     dissertation, a drama of choice that will not be

     unfamiliar to readers of this journal.  Even for an

     avant-gardist like Cage music is still--in the allusion

     to Buddhism--in some sense the sensuous form or "lived

     experience" of the religious.^6^

[5]       Was it not the function of music in relation to

     the great feudal ideologies--Islam, Christianity,

     Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Confucianism--to produce

     the sensation of the sublime and the eternal so as to

     constitute the image of the reward which awaited the

     faithful and obedient: the reward for submitting to

     exploitation or the reward for accepting the burden of

     exploiting?  I am remembering as I write this

     Monteverdi's beautiful echo duet _Due Seraphim_--two

     angels--for the _Vespers of the Virgin Mary_ of 1610,

     whose especially intense sweetness is perhaps related

     to the fact that it was written in a moment of crisis

     of both feudalism and Catholicism.

[6]       Just before Monteverdi, the Italian Mannerists had

     proclaimed the formal autonomy of the art work from

     religious dogma.  But if the increasing secularization

     of music in the European late Baroque and 18th century

     led on the one hand to the Jacobin utopianism of the

     _Ninth Symphony_, it produced on the other something

     like Kant's aesthetics of the sublime, that is a

     mysticism of the bourgeois ego.  As Adorno was aware,

     we are still in modern music in a domain where, as in

     the relation of music and feudalism, aesthetic

     experience, repression and sublimation, and class

     privilege and self-legitimation converge.^7^


                         * * * * * * * *


[7]       Genovese has pointed out in the Afro-American

     slave spiritual something like a contrary articulation

     of the relation of music and the religious to the one I

     have been suggesting: the sense in which both the music

     and the words of the song keep alive culturally the

     image of an imminent redemption from slavery and

     oppression, a redemption which lies within human time

     and a "real" geography of slave and free states ("The

     river Jordan is muddy and wide / Gotta get across to

     the other side").^8^  Of the so-called Free Jazz

     movement of the 60s--Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman,

     Albert Ayler, late Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra,

     etc.--the French critic Pierre Lere remarked in a

     passage quoted centrally by Herbert Marcuse in one

     of the key statements of 60s aesthetic radicalism:

          (...)the liberty of the musical form is only the

          aesthetic translation of the will to social

          liberation.  Transcending the tonal framework of

          the theme, the musician finds himself in a

          position of freedom(...) The melodic line becomes

          the medium of communication between an initial

          order which is rejected and a final order which is

          hoped for.  The frustrating possession of the one,

          joined with the liberating attainment of the

          other, establishes a rupture in between the Weft

          of harmony which gives way to an aesthetic of the

          cry (_esthetique du cri_).  This cry, the

          characteristic resonant (_sonore_) element of

          "free music," born in an exasperated tension,

          announces the violent rupture with the established

          white order and translates the advancing

          (_promotrice_) violence of a new black order.^9^


                         * * * * * * * *


[8]       Music itself as ideology, as an ideological

     practice?  What I have in mind is not at all the

     problem, common both to a Saussurian and a vulgar

     marxist musicology, of "how music expresses ideas."

     Jacques Attali has correctly observed that while music

     can be defined as noise given form according to a code,

     nevertheless it cannot be equated with a language.

     Music, though it has a precise operationality, never

     has stable reference to a semantic code of the

     linguistic type.  It is a sort of language without

     meaning.^10^

[9]       Could we think of music then as outside of

     ideology to the extent that it is non-verbal?  (This,

     some will recall, was Della Volpe's move in his

     _Critique of Taste_.)  One problem with

     poststructuralism in general and deconstruction in

     particular has been their tendency to see ideology as

     essentially bound up with language--the "Symbolic"--

     rather than organized states of feeling in general.^11^

     But we certainly inhabit a cultural tradition where it

     is a common-sense proposition that people listen to

     music precisely to escape from ideology, from the

     terrors of ideology and the dimension of practical

     reason.  Adorno, in what I take to be the

     quintessential modernist dictum, writes: "Beauty is

     like an exodus from the world of means and ends, the

     same world to which beauty however owes its objective

     existence."^12^

[10]      Adorno and the Frankfurt School make of the

     Kantian notion of the aesthetic as a purposiveness

     without purpose precisely the locus of the radicalizing

     and redemptive power of art, the sense in which by

     alienating practical aims it sides with the repressed

     and challenges domination and exploitation,

     particularly the rationality of capitalist

     institutions.  By contrast, there is Lenin's famous

     remark--it's in Gorki's _Reminiscences_--that he had

     to give up listening to Beethoven's _Appasionata_

     sonata: he enjoyed it too much, it made him feel soft,

     happy, at one with all humanity.  His point would seem

     to be the need to resist a narcotic and pacifying

     aesthetic gratification in the name of the very

     difficult struggle--and the corresponding ideological

     rigor--necessary to at least setting in motion the

     process of building a classless society.  But one

     senses in Lenin too the displacement or sublation of an

     aesthetic sensibility onto the field of revolutionary

     activism.  And in both Adorno and Lenin there is a

     sense that music is somehow in excess of ideology.

[11]      Not only the Frankfurt School, but most major

     tendencies in "Western Marxism" (a key exception is

     Gramsci) maintain some form or other of the

     art/ideology distinction, with a characteristic

     ethical-epistemological privileging of the aesthetic

     _over_ the ideological.  In Althusser's early essays--

     "A Letter on Art to Andre Daspre," for example--art was

     said to occupy an intermediate position between science

     and ideology, since it involved ideology (as, so to

     speak, its raw material), but in such a way as to

     provoke an "internal distancing" from ideology,

     somewhat as in Brecht's notion of an "alienation

     effect" which obliges the spectator to scrutinize and

     question the assumptions on which the spectacle has

     been proceeding.  In the section on interpellation in

     Althusser's later essay on ideology, this "modernist"

     and formalist concern with estrangement and

     defamiliarization has been displaced by what is in

     effect a postmodernist concern with fascination and

     fixation.  If ideology, in Althusser's central thesis,

     is what constitutes the subject in relation to the

     real, then the domain of ideology is not a world-view

     or set of (verbal) ideas, but rather the ensemble of

     signifying practices in societies: that is, the

     cultural.  In interpellation, the issue is not

     _whether_ ideology is happening in the space of

     something like aesthetic experience, or whether "good"

     or "great" art transcends the merely ideological

     (whereas "bad" art doesn't), but rather _what_ or

     _whose_ ideology, because the art work is precisely

     (one of the places) where ideology happens, though of

     course this need not be the dominant ideology or even

     any particular ideology.


                         * * * * * * * *


[12]      If the aesthetic effect consists in a certain

     satisfaction of desire--a "pleasure" (in the

     formalists, the recuperation or production of

     sensation)--, and if the aesthetic effect is an

     ideological effect, then the question becomes not the

     separation of music and ideology but rather their

     relation.

[13]      Music would seem to have in this sense a special

     relation to the pre-verbal, and thus to the Imaginary

     or more exactly to something like Kristeva's notion of

     the semiotic.^13^  In the sort of potted lacanianism we

     employ these days in cultural studies, we take it that

     objects of imaginary identification function in the

     psyche--in a manner Lacan designated as "orthopedic"--

     as metonyms of an object of desire which has been

     repressed or forgotten, a desire which can never be

     satisfied and which consequently inscribes in the

     subject a sense of insufficiency or fading.  In

     narcissism, this desire takes the form of a libidinal

     identification of the ego with an image or sensation of

     itself as (to recall Freud's demarcation of the

     alternatives in his 1916 essay on narcissism) it is,

     was or should be.  From the third of these

     possibilities--images or experiences of the ego as it

     should be--Freud argued that there arises as a

     consequence of the displacement of primary narcissism

     the images of an ideal ego or ego ideal, internalized

     as the conscience or super ego.  Such images, he added,

     are not only of self but also involve the social ideals

     of the parent, the family, the tribe, the nation, the

     race, etc.  Consequently, those sentiments which are

     the very stuff of ideology in the narrow sense of

     political "isms" and loyalties--belonging to a party,

     being an "american," defending the family "honor,"

     fighting in a national liberation movement, etc.--are

     basically transformations of homoerotic libidinal

     narcissism.

[14]      It follows then that the aesthetic effect--even

     the sort of non-semantic effect produced by the

     organization of sound (in music) or color and line (in

     painting or sculpture)--always implies a kind of social

     Imaginary, a way of being with and/or for others.

     Although they are literature-centered, we may recall in

     this context Jameson's remarks at the end of _The

     Political Unconscious_ (in the section titled "The

     Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology") to the effect that

     "all class consciousness--that is all ideology in the

     strict sense--, as much the exclusive forms of

     consciousness of the ruling classes as the opposing

     ones of the oppressed classes, are in their very nature

     utopian."  From this Jameson claims--this is his

     appropriation of Frankfurt aesthetics--that the

     aesthetic value of a given work of art can never be

     limited to its moment of genesis, when it functioned

     willy-nilly to legitimize some form or other of

     domination.  For if its utopian quality as "art"--its

     "eternal charm," to recall Marx's (eurocentric, petty

     bourgeois) comment on Greek epic poetry--is precisely

     that it expresses pleasurably the imaginary unity of a

     social collectivity, then "it is utopian not as a thing

     in itself, but rather to the extent that such

     collectivities are themselves ciphers for the final

     concretion of collective life, that is the achieved

     utopia of a classless society."^14^

[15]      What this implies, although I'm not sure whether

     Jameson himself makes this point as such, is that the

     political unconscious of the aesthetic is (small c)

     communism.  (One would need to also work through here

     the relation between music--Wagner, Richard Strauss

     --and fascism.)


                         * * * * * * * *


[16]      I want to introduce at this point an issue which

     was particularly crucial to the way in which I

     experienced and think about music, which is the

     relation of music and drugs.  It is said the passage

     from _Nausea_ I used before derived from Sartre's

     experiments in the 30s with mescaline.  Many of you

     will have your own versions of essential psychedelic

     experiences of the 60s, but here--since I'm not likely

     to be nominated in the near future for the Supreme

     Court--is one of mine.  It is 1963, late at night. I'm

     a senior in college and I've taken peyote for the first

     time.  I'm lying face down on a couch with a red

     velour cover.  Mozart is playing, something like the

     adagio of a piano concerto.  As my nausea fades--peyote

     induces in the first half hour or so a really intense

     nausea--I begin to notice the music which seems to

     become increasingly clear and beautiful.  I feel my

     breath making my body move against the couch and I feel

     the couch respond to me as if it were a living

     organism, very soft and very gentle, as if it were the

     body of my mother.  I remember or seem to remember

     being close to my mother in very early childhood.  I am

     overwhelmed with nostalgia.  The room fills with light.

     I enter a timeless, paradisiacal state, beyond good and

     evil.  The music goes on and on.

[17]      There was of course also the freak-out or bad

     trip: the drug exacerbated sensation that the music is

     incredibly banal and stupid, that the needle of the

     record player is covered with fuzz, that the sound is

     thick and ugly like mucus; Charlie Manson hearing

     secret apocalyptic messages in "Helter Skelter" on the

     Beatles's _White Album_; the Stones at Altamont.

     Modernism in music, say the infinitely compressed

     fragments of late Webern, is the perception in the

     midst of the bad trip, of dissonance, of a momentary

     cohesion and radiance, whose power is all the greater

     because it shines out of chaos and evil.  In Frankfurt

     aesthetics, dissonance is the voice of the oppressed in

     music.  Thus for Adorno it is only in dissonance, which

     destroys the illusion of reconciliation represented by

     harmony, that the power of seduction of the inspiring

     character of music survives.^15^


                         * * * * * * * *


          Consider what moderation is required to express

          oneself so briefly...  You can stretch every

          glance out into a poem, every sigh into a novel.

          But to express a novel in a single gesture, a joy

          in a breath--such concentration can only be

          present in proposition to the absence of self-

          pity.

                                  --Schoenberg on Webern^16^


                         * * * * * * * *


[18]      Cage's _4'33"_--which is a piece where the

     performer sits at a piano without playing anything for

     four minutes and thirty-three seconds--is a

     postmodernist homage to modernist aesthetics, to

     serialism and private language music.  What it implies

     is that the listening subject is to compose from the

     very absence of music the music, the performance from

     the frustration of the expected performance.  As in

     the parallel cases of Duchamp's ready-mades or

     Rauschenberg's white paintings, such a situation gives

     rise to an appropriately "modernist" anxiety (which

     might be allegorized in Klee's twittering birds whose

     noise emanates from the very miniaturization,

     compression and silent tension of the pictorial space)

     to create an aesthetic experience out of the given,

     whatever it is.

[19]      Postmodernism per se in music, on the other hand,

     is where the anxiety of the listener to "make sense of"

     the piece is either perpetually frustrated by pure

     randomness--Cage's music of chance--or assuaged and

     dissipated by a bland, "easy-listening" surface with

     changes happening only in a Californian _longue duree_,

     as in the musics of La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Terry

     Riley, or Steve Reich.  The intention of such musics,

     we might say, is to transgress both the Imaginary and

     Symbolic: they are a sort of brainwashing into the

     Real.


                         * * * * * * * *


     I [heart] ADORNO

               --bumper sticker (thanks to Hilary Radner)


                         * * * * * * * *


[20]      One form of capitalist utopia which is portended

     in contemporary music--we could call it the Chicago

     School or neoliberal form--is the utopia of the record

     store, with its incredible proliferation and variety of

     musical commodities, its promise of "different strokes

     for different folks," as Sly Stone would have it:

     Michael Jackson--or Prince--, Liberace, Bach on

     original instruments or _a la _ Cadillac by the

     Philadelphia Orchestra, Heavy Metal--or Springsteen--,

     Country (what kind of Country: Zydeco, Appalachian,

     Bluegrass, Dolly Parton, trucker, New Folk, etc.?),

     jazz, blues, spirituals, soul, rap, hip hop, fusion,

     college rock (Grateful Dead, REM, Talking Heads), SST

     rock (Meat Puppets etc.), Holly Near, _Hymnen_,

     _salsa_, reggae, World Beat, _norteno_ music,

     _cumbias_, Laurie Anderson, 46 different recorded

     versions of _Bolero_, John Adams, and so on and on,

     with the inevitable "crossovers" and new "new waves."

     By contrast, even the best stocked record outlets in

     socialist countries were spartan.

[21]      But this is also "Brazil" (as in the song/film):

     the dystopia of behaviorly tailored, industrially

     manufactured, packaged and standardized music--Muzak--,

     where it is expected that everyone except owners and

     managers of capital will be at the same time a fast

     food chain worker and consumer.  Muzak is to music

     what, say, McDonalds is to food; and since its purpose

     is to generate an environment conducive to both

     commodity production and consumption, it is more often

     than not to be heard in places like McDonalds (or, so

     we are told in prison testimonies, in that Latin

     American concomitant of Chicago School economics which

     are torture chambers, with the volume turned up to the

     point of distortion).

[22]      In Russell Berman's perhaps overly anxious image,

     Muzak implies a fundamental mutation of the public

     sphere, "the beautiful illusion of a collective,

     singing along in dictatorial unanimity."  Its ubiquity,

     as in the parallel cases of advertising and packaging

     and design, refers to a situation where there is no

     longer, Berman writes, "an outside to art (...) There

     is no pre-aesthetic dimension to social activity, since

     the social order itself has become dependent on

     aesthetic organization."^17^

[23]      Berman's concern here I take to be in the

     spirit of the general critique Habermas--and in this

     country Christopher Lasch--have made of postmodern

     commodity culture, a critique which as many people have

     noted coincides paradoxically (since its main

     assumption is that postmodernism is a reactionary

     phenomenon) with the cultural politics of the new

     Right, for example Alan Bloom's clinically paranoid

     remarks on rock in _The Closing of the American

     Mind_.^18^

[24]      Is the loss of autonomy of the aesthetic

     however a bad thing--something akin to Marcuse's notion

     of a "repressive desublimation" which entails the loss

     of art's critical potential--, or does it indicate a

     new vulnerability of capitalist societies--a need to

     legitimize themselves through aestheticization--and

     therefore both a _new possibility_ for the left and a

     new centrality for cultural and aesthetic matters in

     left practice?  For, as Berman is aware, the

     aestheticization of everyday life was also the goal of

     the historical avant garde in its attack on the

     institution of the autonomy of the aesthetic in

     bourgeois culture, which made it at least potentially a

     form of anti-capitalist practice.  The loss of aura or

     desublimation of the art work may be a form of

     commodification but it is also, as Walter Benjamin

     pointed out, a form of democratization of culture.^19^

[25]      Cage writes suggestively, for example, of "a

     music which is like furniture--a music, that is, which

     will be part of the noises of the environment, will

     take them into consideration.  I think of it as a

     melodious softening the noises of the knives and forks,

     not dominating them, not imposing itself.  It would

     fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall

     between friends dining together."^20^  In some of the

     work of La Monte Young or Brian Eno, music becomes

     consciously an aspect of interior decorating.  What

     this takes us back to is not Muzak but the admirable

     baroque tradition of _Tafel Musik_: "table" or dinner

     music.  Mozart still wrote at the time of the French

     Revolution comfortably and well _divertimentii_ meant

     to accompany social gatherings, including meetings of

     his Masonic lodge.  After Mozart, this utilitarian or

     "background" function is repressed in bourgeois art

     music, which will now require the deepest concentration

     and emotional and intellectual involvement on the part

     of the listening subject.

[26]      The problem with Muzak is not its ubiquity or the

     idea of environmental music per se, but rather its

     insistently kitsch and conservative melodic-harmonic

     content.  What is clear, on the other hand, is that

     the intense and informed concentration on the art work

     which is assumed in Frankfurt aesthetics depends on an

     essentially Romantic, formalist and individualist

     conception of both music and the listening subject,

     which is not unrelated to the actual processes of

     commodification "classical" music was undergoing in the

     late 18th and 19th centuries.


                         * * * * * * * *


[27]      The antidote to Muzak would seem to be something

     like Punk.  By way of a preface to a discussion of Punk

     and extending the considerations above on the relation

     between music and commodification, I want to refer

     first to Jackson Pollock's great painting _Autumn

     Rhythm_ in the Met, a picture that--like Pollock's work

     in general--is particularly admired by Free Jazz

     musicians.  It's a vast painting with splotches of

     black, brown and rust against the raw tan of unprimed

     canvas, with an incredible dancing, swirling,

     clustering, dispersing energy.  As you look at it, you

     become aware that while the ambition of the painting

     seems to be to explode or expand the pictorial space of

     the canvas altogether, it is finally only the limits of

     the canvas which make the painting possible as an art

     object.  The limit of the canvas is its aesthetic

     autonomy, its separation from the life world, but also

     its commodity status as something that can be bought,

     traded, exhibited.  The commodity is implicated in the

     very form of the "piece;" as in the jazz record in

     _Nausea_, "The music ends." (The 78 RPM record--the

     commodity form of recorded music in the 20s and 30s--

     imposed a three minute limit per side on performances

     and this in turn shaped the way songs were arranged in

     jazz or pop recording: cf. the 45 and the idea today of

     the "single.")

[28]      Such a situation might indicate one limit of

     Jameson's cultural hermeneutic.  If the strategy in

     Jameson is to uncover the emancipatory utopian-

     communist potential locked up in the artifacts of the

     cultural heritage, this is also in a sense to leave

     everything as it is, as in Wittgenstein's analytic

     (because that which is desired is already there; it

     only has to be "seen" correctly), whereas the problem

     of the relation of art and social liberation is also

     clearly the need to _transgress_ the limits imposed by

     existing artistic forms and practices and to produce

     new ones.  To the extent, however, such transgressions

     can be recontained within the sphere of the aesthetic--

     in a new series of "works" which may also be available

     as commodities--, they will produce paradoxically an

     affirmation of bourgeois culture: in a certain sense

     they _are _ bourgeois high culture.

[29]      A representation of this paradox in terms of 60s

     leftism is the great scene in Antonioni's film

     _Zabriskie Point_ where the (modernist) desert home of

     the capitalist pig is (in the young woman's

     imagination) blown up, and we see in ultra slow motion,

     in beautiful Technicolor, accompanied by a spacy and

     sinister Pink Floyd music track, the whole commodity

     universe of late capitalism--cars, tools, supermarket

     food, radios, TVs, clothes, furniture, records, books,

     decorations, utensils--float by.  What is not clear is

     who could have placed the bomb, so that Jameson might

     ask in reply a question the film itself also leaves

     unanswered: is this an image of the destruction of

     capitalism or of its fission into a new and "higher"

     stage where it fills all space and time, where there is

     no longer something--nature, the Third World, the

     unconscious--outside it? And this question suggests

     another one: to what extent was the cultural radicalism

     of the 60s, nominally directed against the rationality

     of capitalist society and its legitimating discourses,

     itself a form of modernization of capitalism, a

     prerequisite of its "expanded" reproduction in the new

     international division of labor and the proliferation

     of electronic technologies--with corresponding "mind-

     sets"--which emerge in the 70s?^21^


                         * * * * * * * *


     From Punk manifestos:


          Real life stinks.


          What has been shown is that you and I can do

          anything in any area without training and with

          little cash.


          We're demanding that real life keep up with

          advertising, the speed of advertising on TV...  We

          are living at the speed of advertising.  We demand

          to be entertained all the time, we get bored very

          quickly.  When we're on stage, things happen a

          thousand times faster, everything we do is totally

          compressed and intense on stage, and that's our

          version of life as we feel and see it.

          In the future T.V. will be so good that the

          printed word will function as an artform only.  In

          the future we will not have time for leisure

          activities.  In the future we will "work" one day

          a week.  In the future there will be machines

          which will produce a religious experience in the

          user.  In the future there will be so much going

          on that no one will be able to keep track of it.

          (David Byrne)^22^


[30]      The emergence and brief hegemony of Punk--from,

     say, 1975 to 1982--was related to the very high levels

     of structural unemployment or subemployment which

     appear in First World capitalist centers in the 70s as

     a consequence of the winding down of the post-World War

     II economic long cycle, and which imply especially for

     lower middle class and working class youth a consequent

     displacement of the work ethic towards a kind of on the

     dole bohemianism or dandyism.  Punk aimed at a sort of

     rock or Gesamtkunstwerk (Simon Frith has noted its

     connections with Situationist ideology^23^) which

     would combine music, fashion, dance, speech forms,

     mime, graphics, criticism, new "on the street" forms

     of appropriation of urban space, and in which in

     principle everybody was both a performer and a

     spectator.  Its key musical form was three-chord garage

     power rock, because its intention was to contest art

     rock and superstar rock, to break down the distance

     between fan and performer.  Punk was loud, aggressive,

     eclectic, anarchic, amateur, self-consciously anti-

     commercial and anti-hippie at the same time.

[31]      As it was the peculiar genius of the Sex Pistol's

     manager, Malcolm McClaren, to understand, both the

     conditions of possibility and the limits of Punk were

     those of a still expanding capitalist consumer culture

     --a culture which, in one sense, was intended as a

     _compensation_ for the decline in working-class

     standards of living.  Initially, Punk had to create its

     own forms of record production and distribution,

     independent of the "majors" and of commercial music

     institutions in general.  The moment that to be

     recognized as Punk is to conform to an established

     image of consumer desire, to be different say than

     New Wave, is the moment Punk becomes the new commodity.

     It is the moment of the Sex Pistols' US tour depicted

     in _Sid and Nancy_, where on the basis of the

     realization that they are becoming a commercial success

     on the American market--_the_ new band--they auto-

     destruct.  But the collapse of Punk--and its undoubted

     flirtation with nihilism--should not obscure the fact

     that it was for a while--most consciously in the work

     of British groups like the Clash or the Gang of Four

     and also in collective projects like Rock Against

     Racism--a very powerful form of Left mass culture,

     perhaps--if we are attentive to Lenin's dictum that

     ideas acquire a material force when they reach the

     millions--one of the most powerful forms we have seen

     in recent years in Western Europe and the United

     States.  Some of Punk's heritage lives on in the

     popularity of U2 or Tracy Chapman today and or in the

     recent upsurge of Heavy Metal (which, it should be

     recalled, has one of its roots in the Detroit 60s

     movement band, MC5).


                         * * * * * * * *


[32]      The notion of postmodernism initially comes into

     play to designate a crisis in the dominant canons of

     American architecture.  Hegel posited architecture over

     music as the world historical form of Romantic art,

     because in architecture the reconciliation of spirit

     and matter, reason and history, represented ultimately

     by the state was more completely realized.  Hence, for

     example, Jameson's privileging of architecture in his

     various discussions of postmodernism.  I think that

     today, however, particularly if we are thinking about

     how to develop a left practice on the terrain of the

     postmodern, we have to be for music as against

     architecture, because it is in architecture that the

     power and self-representation of capital and the

     imperialist state reside, whereas music--like sports--

     is always and everywhere a power of cultural production

     which is in the hands of the people.  Capital can

     master and exploit music--and modern musics like rock

     are certainly forms of capitalist culture--, but it can

     never seize hold of and monopolize its means of

     production, as it can say with literature.  The

     cultural presence of the Third World in and against the

     dominant of imperialism is among other things, to

     borrow Jacques Attali's concept, "noise"--the intrusion

     of new forms of language and music which imply new

     forms of community and pleasure: Bob Marley's reggae;

     Run-DMC on MTV with "Walk This Way" (a crossover of rap

     with white Heavy Metal); "We Shall Overcome" sung at a

     sit-in for Salvadoran refugees; the beautiful South

     African choral music Paul Simon used on _Graceland_

     sung at a township funeral; _La Bamba_; Public Enemy's

     "Fight the Power"; Ruben Blades' _Crossover Dreams_.

[33]      The debate over _Graceland_ some years ago

     indicates that the simple presence of Third World

     music in a First World context implies immediately a

     series of ideological effects, which doesn't mean that

     I think there was a "correct line" on _Graceland_, e.g.

     that it was a case of Third World suffering and

     creative labor sublimated into an item of First World

     white middle-class consumption.^24^  Whatever the

     problems with the concept of the Third World, it can no

     longer mark an "other" that is radically outside of and

     different than contemporary American or British

     society.  By the year 2000, one out of four inhabitants

     of the United States will be non-european (black,

     hispanic of latin american origin, asian or native

     american); even today we are the fourth or fifth

     largest hispanic country in the world (out of twenty).

     In this sense, the Third World is also _inside_ the

     First, "en las entranas del monstruo" (in the entrails

     of the monster) as Jose Marti would have said, and for

     a number of reasons music has been and is perhaps the

     hegemonic cultural form of this insertion.  What would

     American musical culture be like for example without

     the contribution of Afro-American musics?

[34]      Turning this argument on its head, assume

     something like the following: a young guerrilla fighter

     of the FMLN in El Salvador wearing a Madonna T-shirt.

     A traditional kind of Left cultural analysis would have

     talked about cultural imperialism and how the young man

     or woman in question had become a revolutionary _in

     spite of_ Madonna and American pop culture.  I don't

     want to discount entirely the notion of cultural

     imperialism, which seems to me real and pernicious

     enough, but I think we might also begin to consider how

     being a fan of Madonna might in some sense _contribute

     to_ becoming a guerrilla or political activist in El

     Salvador.  (And how wearing a Madonna T-shirt might be

     a form of revolutionary cultural politics: it

     certainly defines--correctly--a community of interest

     between young people in El Salvador and young people in

     the United States who like Madonna.)


                         * * * * * * * *


[35]      Simon Frith has summarized succinctly the critique

     of the limitations of Frankfurt school aesthetic theory

     that has been implicit here:

          The Frankfurt scholars argued that the

          transformation of art into commodity inevitably

          sapped imagination and withered hope--now all that

          could be imagined was what was.  But the artistic

          impulse is not destroyed by capital; it is

          transformed by it.  As utopianism is mediated

          through the new processes of cultural production

          and consumption, new sorts of struggles over

          community and leisure begin.^25^

     More and more--the point has been made by Karl Offe

     among others--the survival of capitalism has become

     contingent on non-capitalist forms of culture,

     including those of the Third World.  What is really

     utopian in the present context is not so much the

     sublation of art into life under the auspices of

     advanced consumer capitalism, but rather the

     current capitalist project of reabsorbing the entire

     life energy of world society into labor markets and

     industrial or service production.  One of the places

     where the conflict between forces and relations of

     production is most acutely evident is in the current

     tensions--the FBI warning at the start of your evening

     video, for example--around the commercialization of VCR

     and digital sound technologies.  Cassettes and CDs are

     the latest hot commodities, but by the same token they

     portend the possibility of a virtual decommodification

     of music and film material, since its reproduction via

     these technologies can no longer be easily contained

     within the "normal" boundaries of capitalist property

     rights.

[36]      As opposed to both Frankfurt school style _Angst_

     about commodification and a neopopulism which can't

     imagine anything finer than Bruce Springsteen (I have

     in mind Jesse Lemisch's polemic against Popular Front

     style "folk" music in _The Nation_)^26^, I think we

     have to reject the notion that certain kinds of music

     are _a priori_ ethically and politically OK and others

     not (which doesn't mean that there is not ideological

     struggle in music and choice of music).  Old Left

     versions of this, some will recall, ranged from

     jazz=good, classical=bad (American CP), to jazz=bad,

     classical=good (Soviet CP).  The position of the Left

     today--understanding this in the broadest possible

     sense, as in the idea of the Rainbow--should be in

     favor of the broadest possible variety and

     proliferation of musics and related technologies of

     pleasure, on the understanding--or hope--that in the

     long run this will be deconstructive of capitalist

     hegemony.  This is a postmodernist position, but it

     also involves challenging a certain smugness in

     postmodernist theory and practice about just how far

     elite/popular, high culture/mass culture distinctions

     have broken down.  Too much of postmodernism seems

     simply a renovated form of bourgeois "art" culture.  To

     my mind, the problem is not how much but rather how

     little commodification of culture has introduced a

     universal aestheticization of everyday life. The Left

     needs to defend the pleasure principle ("fun") involved

     in commodity aesthetics at the same time that it needs

     to develop effective images of _post-commodity_

     gratification linked--as transitional demands--to an

     expansion of leisure time and a consequent

     transformation of the welfare state from the realm of

     economic maintenance--the famous "safety net"--to that

     of the provision of forms of pleasure and personal

     development outside the parameters of commodity

     production.  While it is good and necessary to remind

     ourselves that we are a long way away from the

     particular cultural forms championed by the Popular

     Front--that these are now the stuff of_our_ nostalgia

     mode--, we also need to think about the ways in which

     the Popular Fronts in their day were able to hegemonize

     both mass and elite culture.  The creation--as in a

     tentative way in this paper--of an _ideologeme_ which

     articulates the political project of ending or

     attenuating capitalist domination with both the

     production _and_ consumption of contemporary music

     seems to me one of the most important tasks in cultural

     work the Left should have on its present agenda.

[37]      Of course, what we anticipate in taking up this

     task is also the moment--or moments--when architecture

     becomes the form of expression of the people, because

     that would be the moment when power had really begun to

     change hands.  What would this architecture be like?
     _______________________________________________________


                              NOTES


          1. Theodor Adorno, "Perennial Fashion--Jazz," in
     _Prisms_, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London:
     Neville Spearman, 1967), 128-29.

          2. On this point, see Adorno's remarks in _The
     Philosophy of Modern Music_, trans. Anne Mitchell and
     Wesley Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1980), 129-33.

          3. Christa Burger, "The Disappearance of Art: The
     Postmodernism Debate in the U.S.," _Telos_, 68 (Summer
     1986), 93-106.

          4. Ilhan Mimaroglu, extracts from interview with
     John Cage in record album notes for Berio, Cage,
     Mimaroglu, _Electronic Music_ (Turnabout TV34046S).

          5. Jean-Paul Sartre, _Nausea_, trans. Lloyd
     Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1959), 33-36.

          6.  Cf. the following remarks by the minimalist
     composer La Monte Young:
          Around 1960 I became interested in yoga, in which
          the emphasis is on concentration and focus on the
          sounds inside your head.  Zen meditation allows
          ideas to come and go as they will, which
          corresponds to Cage's music; he and I are like
          opposites which help define each other (...) In
          singing, when the tone becomes perfectly in tune
          with a drone, it takes so much concentration to
          keep it in tune that it drives out all other
          thoughts.  You become one with the drone and one
          with the Creator.
     Cited in Kyle Gann, "La Monte Young: Maximal Spirit,"
     _Village Voice_, June 9, 1987, 70.  (Gann's column in
     the _Voice_ is a good place to track developments in
     contemporary modernist and postmodernist music in the
     NY scene.)

          7. "Beethoven's symphonies in their most arcane
     chemistry are part of the bourgeois process of
     production and express the perennial disaster brought
     on by capitalism.  But they also take a stance of
     tragic affirmation towards reality as a social fact;
     they seem to say that the status quo is the best of all
     possible worlds.  Beethoven's music is as much a part
     of the revolutionary emancipation of the bourgeoisie as
     it anticipates the latter's apologia.  The more
     profoundly you decode works of art, the less absolute
     is their contrast to praxis."  Adorno, _Aesthetic
     Theory_, trans. C. Lenhardt (New York: Routledge &
     Kegan Paul, 1986), 342.

          8. Eugene Genovese, _Roll, Jordan, Roll.  The
     World the Slaves Made_ (New York: Vintage, 1976), 159-
     280.

          9. Pierre Lere, "_Free Jazz_: Evolution ou
     Revolution," _Revue d'esth tique_, 3-4, 1970, 320-21,
     translated and cited in Herbert Marcuse,
     _Counterrevolution and Revolt_ (Boston: Beacon, 1972),
     114.

          10. See Attali's, _Noise: The Political Economy of
     Music_, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of
     Minnesota Press, 1985).

          11. Barthes is perhaps an exception, and Derrida
     has written on pictures and painting.  John Mowitt at
     the University of Minnesota has been doing the most
     interesting work on music from a poststructuralist
     perspective that I have seen. He suggests as a primer
     on poststructuralist music theory I. Stoianova, _Geste,
     Texte, Musique_ (Paris: 10/18, 1985).

          12. _Aesthetic Theory_, 402.

          13. The semiotic for Kristeva is a sort of babble 
     out of which language arises--something between 
     glossolalia and the pre-oedipal awareness of the sounds 
     of the mother's body--and which undermines the subject's
     submission to the Symbolic. "Kristeva makes the case
     that the semiotic is the effect of bodily drives which
     are incompletely repressed when the paternal order has
     intervened in the mother/child dyad, and it is
     therefore 'attached' psychically to the mother's body."
     Paul Smith, _Discerning the Subject_ (Minneapolis:
     Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 121.

          14. Fredric Jameson, _The Political Unconscious.
     Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act_ (Ithaca:
     Cornell, 1981), 288-91.

          15. _Aesthetic Theory_, 21-22.

          16. I've lost the reference for this quote.

          17. Russell Berman, "Modern Art and
     Desublimation," _Telos_, 62 (Winter 1984-85): 48.

          18. Andreas Huyssen notes perceptively that "Given
     the aesthetic field-force of the term postmodernism, no
     neo-conservative today would dream of identifying the
     neo-conservative project as postmodern."  "Mapping the
     Postmodern," in his _After the Great Divide: Modernism, 
     Mass Culture, Postmodernism_ (Bloomington:  Indiana UP, 
     1986), 204.  I became aware of Huyssen's work only as I
     was finishing this paper, but it's obvious that I share
     here his problematic and many of his sympathies 
     (including an ambivalence about McDonalds).

          19. See in particular Susan Buck-Morss,
     "Benjamin's _Passagen-Werk_: Redeeming Mass Culture for
     the Revolution." _New German Critique_, 29 (Spring-
     Summer 1983), 211-240; and in general the work of
     Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Center for Cultural
     Studies.  Peter Burger's summary of recent work on the
     autonomy of art in bourgeois society is useful here:
     _Theory of the Avant-Garde_, trans. Michael Shaw
     (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1984), 35-54.  In a
     way Frankfurt theory didn't anticipate, it has seemed
     paradoxically necessary for capitalist merchandising to
     preserve or inject some semblance of aura in the
     commodity--hence kitsch: the Golden Arches--, whereas
     communist or socialized production should in principle
     have no problem with loss of aura, since it is not
     implicated in the commodity status of a use value or
     good.  Postmodernist pastiche or _mode retro_--where a
     signifier of aura is alluded to or incorporated, but in
     an ironic and playful way--seems an intermediate
     position, in the sense that it can function both to
     endow the commodity with an "arty" quality or to detach
     aspects of commodity aesthetics from commodity
     production and circulation per se, as in Warhol.

          20.  John Cage, "Erik Satie," in _Silence_
     (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), p.76.

          21. "Yet this sense of freedom and possibility--
     which is for the course of the 60s a momentarily
     objective reality, as well as (from the hindsight of
     the 80s) a historical illusion--may perhaps best be
     explained in terms of the superstructural movement and
     play enabled by the transition from one infrastructural
     or systemic stage of capitalism to another."  Fredric
     Jameson, "Periodizing the 60s," in Sohnya Sayres ed.,
     _The 60s Without Apology_ (Minneapolis: _Social
     Text_/Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 208.

          22. From Isabelle Anscombe and Dike Blair eds.,
     _Punk!_ (New York: Urizen, 1978).

          23. Simon Frith, _Sound Effects. Youth, Leisure
     and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll_ (New York: Pantheon,
     1981), 264-268.

          24. On this point, see Andrew Goodwin and Joe Gore
     "World Beat and the Cultural Imperialism Debate,"
     _Socialist Review_ 20.3 (Jul.-Sep., 1990): 63-80.

          25. _Sound Effects_, 268.  Cf. Huyssen: "The
     growing sense that we are not bound to _complete_ the
     project of modernity (Habermas' phrase) and still do
     not necessarily have to lapse into irrationality or
     into apocalyptic frenzy, the sense that art is not
     exclusively pursuing some telos of abstraction, non-
     representation, and sublimity--all of this has opened
     up a host of possibilities for creative endeavors
     today."  _After the Great Divide_, 217.

          26. "I Dreamed I Saw MTV Last Night," _The Nation_
     (October 18, 1986), 361, 374-376; and Lemisch's reply
     to the debate which ensued, "The Politics of Left
     Culture," _The Nation_ (December 20, 1986), 700 ff.


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