25.07.2007
Art and commodification
The working class must have access to the most advanced and sophisticated means of cultural production, argues composer Gordon Downie
Mike Pearn states that I am elitist and that I "argue for art for art's sake in a manner reminiscent of the most vacuous of bourgeois aesthetes" (Letters, July 19). He is able to make this assertion because he has inadequately theorised the notion of aesthetic autonomy. His definition is locked in a 19th century conception. I would suggest that the slogans elitist and l'art pour l'art are both critically sterile and, like other utterances made by Pearn, risk becoming no more than workerist clichés.
A more profitable and instructive analysis is offered by Adorno's bipartite model, which delineates essentially two types of cultural production: that which affirms existing distributions of power by producing cultural artefacts tailored for the market; and that which negates existing power relations by producing cultural artefacts that attempt to resist processes of marketisation and commodification.1 Product positioned in category 1 is dependent upon the market, whilst product placed in category 2 attempts to be critically autonomous or independent of it. Within the former category are located cultural artefacts that accept their function as commodities by submitting to those priorities of marketability and assimilability that are essential features of successful cultural products. Within the latter are located cultural artefacts that seek to resist such processes by prioritising the autonomy of the medium.
Aesthetic autonomy here, then, should not be confused with a 19th century conception of l'art pour l'art, which emphasises art as a means of solipsistic self-expression and self-revelation, and which considers aesthetic action to be transhistorical and transpolitical. Rather aesthetic autonomy in this form represents a direct engagement and confrontation with those processes that seek to conform all phenomena, aesthetic or otherwise, to the priorities of capital and exchange. And it is this form that I attempt to apply in my own work.
Such a typology is customarily dismissed as being reductionist. It is argued that there are many examples of cultural production that cannot be so easily classified or that seek to subvert processes of commodification by exhibiting characteristics drawn from both categories. This model proposes a continuum of action that enables such a typology to be described as overly simplistic or that renders it a tool of limited critical effect.
It is the case, as I have outlined elsewhere (Letters, July 12), that our cultural terrain is littered with examples of cultural artefacts that straddle the border between these two positions. Whilst there may be many motivations for such actions, whether opportunistic or careerist, priorities of survival in such a terrain should not distract us from the underlying impulses for such behaviour. Indeed, labels such as crossover, eclectic or postmodern - labels customarily used within contemporary 'high-art' and media discourse - function to mask these underlying processes by assigning what is otherwise a purely economic relationship an aesthetic, or politically neutral, denotation.
Thus, this model cannot be dismissed because it appears to reproduce the standard distinction between 'popular' and 'serious' music, or 'high' and 'low' art. As Adorno stated, "a great share of supposedly 'serious' music adjusts itself to the demands of the market in the same manner as the composers of [pop] music"2. Much contemporary music is of this kind because it seeks to take advantage of the material benefits that accrue from category 1, in addition to the symbolic benefits that accrue from category 2, as my discussion of the American mimimalist, John Adams, attempted to make clear.3 The commentary of American cultural critic and Trotskyist, Dwight Macdonald, on the effects of this process is instructive in this regard.4
The main problem with strategies of accommodation of this kind is the ease with which the affirmatory characteristics of hybrid products can be appropriated in order to neutralise not only their negatory features, but, more significantly, negation per se. Whilst emphasising the affirmatory aspects of such production, mechanisms of marketing and promotion (the propaganda wing of capital) can manage, absorb and neutralise the impact of those features of such work that are more critically focused, whilst simultaneously exploiting them to fake cultural and political inclusivity. As work of an accommodatory complexion occupies and dominates the cultural space, authentically negatory cultural production is efficiently neutralised. Thus, both fully affirmatory cultural products and those taking a hybrid form, legitimate and assist the maintenance of existing capitalist power relations. In practice, then, the two categories as outlined remain in force.
However, the focus of my original letter (June 21) to which Pearn responded sought to bring attention to the poverty of materials used in popular music and the extent to which this is routinely celebrated by both the political left and right. If Mike Pearn considers that chords I, IV and V and the routine formal archetypes to which they are umbilically connected can sufficiently fulfil creative aspirations, he is free to do so. However, if he finds such materials satisfy his own cultural ambitions, I would ask him not to impose his horizons on the wider working class. Marxists should have greater aspirations than this, and we should ensure that the working class is given access to the most advanced and sophisticated means of cultural production that are available.
If, having had access to such means, Mike Pearn's "young workers" still prefer to confine themselves to chords I, IV and V, then so be it: at least this would constitute an informed choice. However, I do not believe that such choices are made, because such workers are rarely, if ever, offered them. Thus, it is not the cultural forms for which I have "contempt", as Pearn claims, but the socio-economic system that ensures that they constitute the dominant or sole aesthetic experience of the working class.
Total domination?
It has been a recurrent complaint by the Rotten Elements that I have not replied to their criticisms. In large measure this is because I have been unable to discern in their frequently light-hearted and cheerful commentary much that constitutes substantive critique.
Further evidence of this can be found in the latest communiqué from Vivian Bolus (Letters, July 19). Here, Bolus offers a sequence of quotations taken from an online interview between myself and Ian Pace. Little reason is given for their reproduction, no effort is made to critique their contents, and the reader is left to work out why Bolus finds the contents "self-important", "pigeon-nibbling" and an example of "techno-verbiage".
The only explanation for this type of engagement is that the Rotten Elements seek to feign intellectual omniscience by exploiting the unfortunate assumption that those engaged in acts of derision fully understand that which they are attempting to ridicule.
However, despite their best efforts to empty their communiqués of substantive content, I am delighted that they have finally succeeded (with the help of the Grove dictionary of music and musicians) in formulating several observations that are worthy of response, even though they are based on a complete misunderstanding of those topics about which they seek to make comment.
Bolus's main charge, if I understand him correctly, is that one of my motivations for using complex notation is that I "demand total domination" of, and "unswinging obedience" from, musicians. It is true that contemporary music notation has been developed to a very high level of complexity and sophistication. In as much as this is an attempt by composers to specify in detail their intent, then they do indeed hope for and expect instrumentalists to realise in performance what is written on the page. Why is this so surprising? Why is this so shocking? If Bolus wishes to characterise this as "unswinging obedience", then he is free to do so.
But this is not an original charge. Pierre Boulez's Structure 1a for piano (1952) and Karlheinz Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I (1954), two early examples of total serial organisation, were frequently attacked by bourgeois music academics and polemicists as not total, but totalitarian: Bolus is thus in good company. This was a clumsy cold war-inspired attempt to characterise an aesthetic programme as undemocratic in order to downgrade its negatory significance within the sphere of capitalist commodity exchange. By reciting this charge again Bolus is merely regurgitating a critical perspective that even a first-year music undergraduate would be embarrassed to utter.
However, though such notation functions to specify composer intent to ever greater levels of detail, one of the primary motivations for developments of this kind after 1945 can be sourced in composers' involvement in exploring and extending the possibilities of the medium. As greater simplicity offers few developmental possibilities, we should be unsurprised that music, from whatever perspective, has exhibited greater and greater levels of complexity since this time.
But I suspect that Bolus is attempting here to make a wider political point, to assert that there is a correspondence between class domination and the relationships that pertain between composers and other musicians. This interesting, though ultimately sterile, observation is based on a misunderstanding of the division of labour that pertains between composers and performers. Bolus advocates the abolition of this division of labour by collapsing both into a single entity, the improviser. However, abolishing this division of labour may also involve composers and performers assuming both roles simultaneously or at different times in their careers, and there are no barriers, in principle, to this happening.
Bolus then claims that I have a "deep antipathy to improvisation" because improvisation collapses distinctions between composer and performer, a process that would remove my allegedly dominant role. Given he asserts this in the context of discussing the improviser, Derek Bailey, I assume he is referring to so-called 'free improvisation'. Bolus is correct in asserting that I am unsympathetic to free improvisation, but not for the reasons he cites.
I am antipathetic to free improvisation because it is inherently anti-democratic. As a creative process, it is one that is not open to verification and thus its exponents cannot be made accountable for their creative actions and decisions. It is thus a discourse that is non-transparent, and one that offers significant opportunities for deception, pretence and fakery. This is in sharp contrast to composition, especially that which utilises complex notations, where composer intent is transparent and open to more or less immediate verifiability. In addition, free improvisation is merely the aestheticisation of the failures associated with political spontaneity and decentralised, unorganised action.
But one of the main motivations for the complexity exhibited by much contemporary music can be sourced in composers' attempts to embed within the discursive fabric of their music a resistance to processes of reification. Reification is a necessary precondition to those processes of appropriation that aid the successful commodification of cultural products. It is the employment of methods of resistance such as this that enable composers to assert those levels of autonomy outlined earlier in category 2.
Reification
Reification is a concept that elaborates the Marxist theory of alienation. In the case of reification, concrete or conceptual phenomena are regulated and transformed to ease their precise quantifiability and measurement. This process aids their repeatability and management, two features that are essential characteristics of any successful commodity. Reification, then, is a process of commodification.
There is an attempt to disable this process in certain classes of contemporary music by embedding within the notational fabric high levels of multivalency or notational dissidence. Fully univalent notation assists processes of assimilation, as it exhibits easily verifiable metrics of measure and calculation. Thus, any object seeking unhindered passage through commodity society must exhibit those characteristics which enable ownership through ease of comprehension, assimilation, calculability and repeatability. Objects seeking to resist commodification must, therefore, confront and disrupt these processes.
Multivalent notation, characteristic of much avant-garde music since 1945, and illustrated in the example below, offers significant levels of resistance to processes of reification by exhibiting high levels of cognitive, operational and perceptual complexity, characteristics which hinder unreflective performance and response. By being problematised in this way, the medium itself loses its customary transparency. In such circumstances the medium is foregrounded, acting as a potential barrier to processes of reification and appropriation.
Though Bolus seems to recognise the importance and relevance of the serialist, Anton Webern, he asserts that "in 2007 it is ridiculous" (Letters, July 19). This comment is akin to suggesting that what Marx wrote in 1876 is not relevant to conditions in 2007, and exhibits a profound misapprehension regarding both the position of new music in capitalist society and its developmental trajectory over the last century. Given that the revolutionary nature and extent of developments initiated during this period have been poorly, if at all, assimilated and remain - still - in a process of formation, any discussion of their supersession is both premature and, given the nature of alternatives, counterrevolutionary and reactionary.