26.09.2007

Challenging the commodity form

The intermediary terrain that Wieland Hoban claims musicians should inhabit in order to "engage with the world" does not exist, argues Gordon Downie

In his response to my article 'Art and commodification'¹, Wieland Hoban asserts that music exhibiting a "reliance on notational and structural opacity" is considered "a form of fakery - a mannerist smokescreen to obscure the fact that the music is devoid of any other content".²

Such a statement reveals an underlying misunderstanding of those fundamental aesthetic and political premises upon which the high-modernist programme is built. In addition, by referring to structural opacity rather than complexity, he implies that the rationale informing creative action of this kind is deliberately obfuscatory, a traducement not unrepresentative of the critical tenor of the remainder of his article.

Hoban later remarks that such a position, "characterised by an unflinching insistence on work-immanent autonomy, "¦ is a regurgitation of the same dogma that was essential for artistic progress 50 years ago, but is now little more than a worn-out cliché that symbolises the marginalisation of an art that refuses to engage with the world it inhabits".

In this statement Hoban begins to identify the conceptual and aesthetico-political background to creative production of this kind. In so doing, however, he should be aware that the primary principle underlying high-modernist, non-representational and non-mimetic art (of which my own work is an instance) is that of self-referentiality: namely the requirement that the medium should be the bearer of content.

I would assert that notation (and the structures and relationships it functions to articulate) is music. In consequence, creative success in this context can only be measured by the extent to which the music (or the art, or the architecture) is devoid of any signification - or meaning if you will - other than that pertaining to the specific technical and aesthetic concerns and competencies of the medium.

Thus, when viewing a canvas by the constructivist artist Richard Paul Lohse, for example, we should note that the artist is drawing our attention to colour and density relationships, and issues of sequence and mathematical proportion. Does Hoban think that Lohse does this because he is trying to hide the fact that he has not got anything else to say? Here, the medium is the message. Hoban is thus invoking a critical measure that is wholly inappropriate to the object of his critique.

Political foundation

This appears to be a predominantly aesthetic conceptualisation because most discussion - led by bourgeois academics and critics who seek to purge aesthetic analysis of overtly political content - is conducted in those terms. But what Hoban proceeds to describe and dismiss as the "rigorous parametric rationalisation of music" is a programme with a political foundation. Reflecting on the composition of his Structures I for two pianos, Pierre Boulez (adopting customarily politically neutral discourse) remarked that he "wanted to blot out every trace of the traditional in my vocabulary, whether it concerned figures, or phrases, or development, or form", in order to achieve a new organisation that "had not been tainted by foreign matter, stylistic remnants in particular. It bothered me to pick up a pitch system from one composer, a rhythmic principle from another, a formal idea from another."³

The levels of creative eclecticism that Boulez described, and that are characteristic of most cultural production, significantly reduce the control composers and artists have over their materials. Thus, integral serialism⁴ (of which Structure I is an instance) is an attempt to impose semantic and technical control over material. Only by constructing music parametrically, from atomic building blocks, can composers assume command over the medium. Not doing so, composers lose control over its signifying capacity.

Why should composers seek to impose this control? Firstly for issues of accountability. Adopting the creative position Boulez criticises, composers are unable to sufficiently account for the source and rationale of their decision-making. To impose such control is to attempt to implement within an aesthetic and cultural context mechanisms of democratic accountability that are expected or fought for in the wider social and political formation. It is in this work-immanent form that a genuine democratisation of culture can be sourced, rather than in the customary call for accessibility or similar workerist sloganeering.

Secondly, such a process ensures that cultural producers adopt a critical and self-reflective position towards their medium in order to question and critically appraise its underlying operational tenets. Only by doing this can those ideologies that remain encapsulated in a congealed and reified form in received material be adequately identified, critiqued or eliminated.

Thirdly, this critical process seeks to remove from cultural production its manipulative function, whereby the efficacy of cultural artefacts is measured by their ability to alter and stimulate the affective orientation of the subject. This in turn discourages modes of passive consumption and encourages active participation by subjects who find their ability to invoke standard responses to stimuli frustrated or disabled. Though integral serialism (in common with most constructivist art) is frequently disparaged for being programmed music, unlike that which it seeks to confront, it does not seek to programme the listener.

I realise that much of this is a disappointing prospect for a composer such as Wieland Hoban and many others of his ilk of both a left and right political complexion, whose work is bulging with idealist content, concern over the human condition and such metaphysical hocus-pocus as the "experiential depth of art". But the content here is merely an extract from life, a tired, clichéd array of anecdotal, semi-autobiographical introspection concerning such idealist tommyrot as disillusionment, innocence, self-redemption and so on and so forth. If, as he claims, Hoban identifies the political implications inherent in high-modernist art, then he needs to recognise the strategic importance of its refusal to take its allotted place in the network of commodity exchange that preserves art's role as therapy, distraction, entertainment and surrogate religion.

Hoban then describes the high-modernist programme as a "worn-out cliché". A primary qualification for a percept being "worn-out", or attaining 'clichégenic' status, is the over-exposure and routinisation that attends excessive reproduction. Within music at least, these are not attributes one can easily associate with the high-modernist avant-garde. Perhaps Hoban could identify for us where in the concert repertoire, radio and television schedules - in addition to educational programmes - this music is to be found in such excessive preponderance to achieve clichéd status?

Like high-modernism, Marxism has also been described as clichéd and irrelevant by neo-conservative and postmodern proponents of the 'end of history'. But, whilst the conditions that generated radical political alternatives remain unchanged, the need for such alternatives becomes more - not less - urgent.

Need for choice

It is curious that, although Hoban acknowledges the correctness of my analysis of the impact on cultural production of processes of commodification and appropriation, he nevertheless asserts that the "marginalisation" and "isolation" experienced by cultural producers who oppose such processes are "self-imposed". In Hoban's reading, those who do not accept prevailing cultural and political conditions and posit radical alternatives are opportunists because, in the near to medium term at least, the correctness of their analyses cannot be tested, enabling them to "cling to the certainty of their own enlightenment" and the effects of self-aggrandisement that claims of enlightenment may confer. He then states that if I were "challenged with the suggestion that even workers who were educated in the ways of avant-garde music would not find [my] music interesting or enjoyable, the fact that present conditions make that highly improbable ensures that [I] can maintain [my] socio-aesthetic convictions".

But I make no claims that are so dependent. Hoban is once again applying an inappropriate critical tool to the object of his critique. As I clearly stated in 'Art and commodification', "If, having access to such means "¦, 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, my political aim here is the creation and availability of choice, which Hoban appears to accept is missing. The availability of such choices has far-reaching social and political implications, predicated as they are on wholesale political and cultural change - not least to processes of education.

Do I believe that workers, given the opportunity to make informed choices, would prefer Pierre Boulez's Pli selon pli to The Clash? I have no idea and the question is largely polemical and fatuous, a mischief posed to fracture left solidarity. The creation of a society in which such choices could genuinely be made strikes me as a more important and pressing political goal than specific aesthetic considerations such as these. Hoban is unable to "reconcile" my "aesthetic and political views" because he has an overly workerist-oriented view of Marxism and an insufficiently elaborated analysis of proletarian dictatorship.

More broadly, however, despite Hoban's acknowledgement of the relevance and importance of my wider cultural analysis, his prescription is an attack on any kind of fundamental political and social change. If either an individual or an organisation adjusts or discards their programmes for radical change in response to current political conditions that appear to make the realisation of those aims impossible, then the prospect of significant political and social change becomes not unlikely, remote or even utopian, but permanently closed.

Hoban's prescription puts an end to Marxist and all revolutionary politics, in addition to the programmes of all cultural producers that attempt to challenge the dominance of the commodity form by embedding within the discursive fabric of their output a resistance to the market and commodification. His is a prescription for cultural conservatism and reaction.