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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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