03.10.2007

Straw men and solitary revolution

The 'high modernism v improvisation' debate represents a false dichotomy, writes Wieland Hoban

Before addressing the renewed arguments presented by Gordon Downie in his response to my article ?Quixotic windmills? (Weekly Worker August 2), I would like to point out that a substantial part of these are based on a misrepresentation of my own. Though I do not suspect any wilful misreading on his part, it is perhaps a demonstration of his inability to progress beyond one-sided analysis that he cannot distinguish between hypothetical and propositional aspects of my writing.

Downie carries out this distortion from the very beginning. Referring to my article, he writes: ?In his response to my article ?Art and commodification?, 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?. 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? (?Challenging the commodity form?, September 27).

What is surprising is that, despite understanding my statement that the music in question is often considered a form of fakery, he then goes on to ascribe such claims to me. As my remarks were made in response to Downie?s dismissal of improvised music - adopting his own term ?fakery?, one that I considered rather out of place - let us examine them in their actual context. I had written: ?While Downie claims that the improviser?s flight to the realm of non-verifiability is an act of deception, there are many people in that field and numerous others who would argue that his own reliance on notational and structural opacity is itself a form of ?fakery?, a mannerist smokescreen to obscure the fact that the music is devoid of any other content. Both sides of the debate adopt an equally unproductive ?emperor?s new clothes? polemic that probably reveals more about its practitioners than its objects.?

It is indeed bizarre that a man of Downie?s intellectual rigour should miss so obvious a presentation of opposing arguments and my conclusion that they are both one-sided, mistaking my comments for an endorsement of one. On the contrary, I wrote this to show that his disparagement of improvisation as charlatanry is no better than the claim made by other factions that he himself is guilty of such pretence. As he uses this representation as a point of departure in characterising my own position as ?conformist?, ?accommodating? and the like, this is a matter of some significance.

Continuing this distortion of my views, Downie then writes: ?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 clich? that symbolises the marginalisation of an art that refuses to engage with the world it inhabits?.? What he omits is the statement preceding this - namely that ?It would hardly be a novelty to argue that his position, characterised by ??, etc. This, once again, is an assessment of the cases that can be made against his aesthetic in response to his attacks on improvisation. My point was that such an argument has frequently been made, but is as unhelpful in its polemical exaggeration as what Downie had written. Considering that I was trying to show how, in presenting improvisation as a symbol of organisational failure in political resistance, he was overlooking the fact that the high modernist ground he occupies does no better in meeting the criteria of political effectiveness - and indeed questioning the application of such criteria in the first place - he once again shows a failure to understand the actual tenor of my critique.

Rather, he suggests that I ?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.? Does Downie seriously think that I am unaware of such a principle? If so, he has very much underestimated the background to my arguments and the consideration that has gone into them - and presumably supposed that as an exponent of ?conformist? music, I am not educated in such matters. Has he considered, then, that improvised music might also be self-referential? Does he suppose it to be mimetic, considering that it is based on an eschewal of melody, harmony and any obvious rhythmic language, not to mention a frequent rejection of customary playing techniques? While not usually based on the structuralist media he is describing, it is no more subscriptive than his own music to the straw man claims he is ascribing to it.

His statement that ?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? is redundant; a central bone of contention in the opposition of improvisation and structured composition was the criterion of political effectiveness. Here I can only renew my own statement that neither form of music can make any great claims to such consequences.

It is only consistent, then, that Downie asks: ?Does Hoban think that Lohse ? is trying to hide the fact that he has not got anything else to say?? No, I do not; as should have been clear to the attentive reader, I do not subscribe to such a one-sided view myself. While I have reservations about any wholesale structuralist approach, I am not so bone-headed as to dismiss such work as a result. He continues this false characterisation by claiming that I ?describe and dismiss? the serial approach, when in fact the ?rigorous parametric rationalisation of music? is something that remains a background to my own aesthetic thinking. I shall refrain from boring the reader with further examples of the ways in which Downie has quoted me in a misleading fashion; it should be amply clear by now.

Faith in structuralism

Having got this misrepresentation out of the way, Downie reiterates his naive statement of faith in structuralism. Referring to Pierre Boulez?s insistence on creating a clean musical slate, purged of traditional elements, he writes: ?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.? This is indeed potentially true; an unquestioning adoption of conventions suggests a lack of creative autonomy, or at least a reluctance to assume any opposing position to tradition. Downie, however, overestimates the potential of that approach?s polar opposite; though it is indisputable that ?integral serialism ? is an attempt to impose semantic and technical control over material?, it is misguided to think that the question of control is now resolved.

?To impose such control,? Downie writes, ?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.? Certainly this mirrors the position of Luigi Nono some 50 years ago, who attacked the use of indeterminacy and chance elements propagated by John Cage on the basis of a lack of responsibility, even breaking with Karlheinz Stockhausen on the (partial) basis of his dabbling in the same; Nono, however, was not so unrealistic as to assume that rigorous serial procedures were enough in their own right to express any political position, instead using texts with more explicit content to communicate the desired message.

While a strict technical approach can naturally accompany an insistence on personal accountability, the days are long gone when there was anything personal or innovative about integral serialist methods, let alone political; Milton Babbitt, that most hard-line exponent of American serialism, the epitome of such ?accountability? and systematic rigour (of an order and complexity well beyond that of Stockhausen or Boulez), is associated with rightwing political views, social elitism and an insistence that composition is an academic activity that need not be answerable to any wider world-related concerns.

This is not, as Downie might argue, an anomalous or indeed irrelevant case; rather, it illustrates that an attempt to achieve maximum control over material is as amenable to class oppression and anti-democracy as any other aesthetic approach. Though one should not draw conclusions about the value of art based on its creator?s character and beliefs, Babbitt is certainly no exponent of ?a genuine democratisation of culture?, something Downie evidently considers integral to such work-immanent form. Whether dismissing the uneducated, like Babbitt, or dismissing the conformist, like Downie, structuralists can be of as varied a persuasion as any other artists.

One encounters this same blindness to prosaic reality in Downie?s claim that ?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?. How is a reliance on neutral systematic techniques intrinsically critical or self-reflective? Processes, algorithms and the like are wonderfully amenable to a mode of composition involving very little self-critique, as they produce automated results. Critique would begin after this, in a manipulation, perhaps even subversion, of such results; a composer such as Brian Ferneyhough is a good example of an artist who both uses and undermines such systematic rigour, producing music that does not sound remotely technoid without relying on artistic property of the past. Parametric systematisation in itself, however, does not constitute an increase in artistic control; it rather enables an abdication of control to mechanisms, which is the opposite of personal accountability. As I say, one can deal with it in a way that gives it more individual definition - but that involves subverting the system, not blindly trusting it.

Exchanging deities

Though full of misrepresentations and misconceptions, Downie?s argumentation until this point is at least comparatively clear and objective; it is unfortunate that he subsequently descends into mean-spirited polemic. He professes to realise that ?much of this is a disappointing prospect for a composer such as Wieland Hoban and many others of his ilk?. He would do better to refrain from placing me in some reified, impersonal category - which hardly supports his socially-motivated case - and trying to achieve by personal means what he has failed to achieve rationally. Despite having little knowledge of my work, he feels entitled to state that it is ?bulging with idealist content, concern over the human condition and such metaphysical hocus-pocus as the ?experiential depth of art??.

It is baffling that an artist should slur this latter criterion, which is precisely what distinguishes empty from powerful art, as ?metaphysical hocus-pocus?; one may as well argue that demanding equality for the disadvantaged is sentimental nonsense, being based on a clich?d conception of humanity rather than an entirely rationalised world-view that is the ally of reification, not democracy. It is highly ironic that Downie promotes his refusal to allow his music to take an ?allotted place in the network of commodity exchange that preserves art?s role as therapy, distraction, entertainment and surrogate religion?. Surrogate religion? Indeed: as Nietzsche traded in his dead god for the worship of art, Downie has simply exchanged one deity for another.

Downie is right to question the grounds for referring to something as a clich?; what he fails to realise, however, is that this affects his own argumentation as much as mine. He writes: ?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 clich?d status?? Indeed: this is at the most a clich? within a small sector of society. But a visit to the biennial New Music course in Darmstadt, for example (which he even attended in 1994), which has been both the site of high modernism?s golden hour and its vehement rejections, would confront Downie with the fact that what he is espousing may in one sense be radical, but is also very much historical.

Of course, it is unrealistic to apply such criteria on a global scale; as the majority of people in the world have no interest in or knowledge of this music, they would not consider any aspect of it clich?d. But nor, to address Downie?s position, would they consider even the most user-friendly, audience-oriented forms of contemporary music ?conformist? or ?tired?; the tolerance of many concert-goers is already tested by composers such as Julian Anderson or James MacMillan, who would be considered highly accessible and commercial among initiates. The mere absence of tonality is found harsh and anarchic by many, so it is as Quixotic as ever for Downie to suppose that his rejection of such music implies any rejection of wider commodification.

Following this point further, Downie very much misses my own in writing that ?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.?

Firstly, as stated above, Downie is rejecting something that cannot realistically be considered a symbol of ?prevailing cultural and political conditions?. Within contemporary music, perhaps; but that is a marginal realm in any case. Secondly, it appears to escape Downie that there is a difference between a personal rejection of an ideology and a perceptible opposition to it. I cannot deny his success in eliminating conventional, accessible elements from his own music; to hope for more than this, however, is utopian. If, as he states, his ?political aim here is the creation and availability of choice?, I see no way in which he is contributing towards that aim through his compositions.

He is following his own choice, certainly, and asserting his right to it. But if, as his boasts demand, we are talking about real effects on socio-political structures - which, in somewhat contradictory fashion, would allegedly constitute a ?largely polemical and fatuous? line of argumentation, a ?mischief posed to fracture left solidarity? - then petitions, meetings with politicians and administrators and the like, concrete attempts to influence the structures that determine the absence of choice (which is no mean feat, I realise), would be a more logical course of action. And Downie even admits this: ?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.? Yet he draws his aesthetic justification from political claims, while rejecting their ultimate conclusions; in this manner he is able to posture as a revolutionary without having to deliver any results.

Illusions of impact

If this constitutes an ?overly workerist-oriented view of Marxism?, then so be it; but it is extremely far-fetched to conclude that it does. It merely constitutes a desire to distinguish between different spheres of social activity. It is a mystery to me, therefore, how my ?prescription? - as if I had prescribed anything! - is ?an attack on any kind of fundamental political and social change?. It is an attack on illusions of impact, not on real social or political change. Downie?s failure to distinguish between the two raises serious questions about what world he is living in.

In keeping with the self-importance of his boasts, Downie ends his article on a melodramatic note: ?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.? All I can say in response is that, if that is the case, the cultural establishment has shown an astounding failure to acknowledge my ?reactionary? and ?conformist? aesthetic as anything that supports its goals. Clearly I am doing something wrong.

In closing, I would like to point out that, far from being ?a construct formed to mask conventional political and aesthetic accommodation, opportunism and conformism?, my attempt to view life and culture in the dialectical fashion they demand - which Downie characteristically denigrates as a ?middle ground? - is an attempt to combine idealism and realism, rather than a contentment to dwell in a fools? paradise of straw men and solitary revolution. It is not ?a process that continues to put a brake on genuine and permanent political and social change?; it does not put a brake on anything, rather striving for a diversity of perspective that is obviously at odds with Downie?s tunnel vision.

Such ?brakes? are far more characteristic of the dogmatic rationalisation propagated by Downie, which is less remote from the reification he seeks to oppose than he would like to think.