The Revolutionary Structure of Sound: experimental musings.
Most popular music could hardly be described as revolutionary in the old (and still urgent) sense, yet to dismiss musical production and its associated pleasures as irrelevant to revolution would make for exceedingly dull practice. Most contemporary musicians, and even or perhaps especially those who claim to be ‘political’, are hardly capable of a revolutionary politics sufficient to pose a challenge to capitalism at this time. This, of course, will not be news. It is necessary only to refer to the ways in which the anti-establishment ethos of much rock and roll is so easily absorbed into the logistics of transnational entertainment sales and corporate bureaux to recognise the dominance of the market here. The Rolling Stones tour of Europe sponsored by Volkswagen would be an obvious example of the way the Industry is calibrated with the dollar for even the most decadently wasted punks. Lydon’s Sex Pistols bartered their way into hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of record and movie contracts and settlements on the basis of a few chords and some well-aimed abuse of, among many, the old batty Lizzie herself (she with metal hat). In the USA gangsta rappers (Dre, Snoop, Warren G) and preppy message-mongering hip-hopsters (like Arrested Development) alike are in it for the money (and with some justification - look out for Dipa Basu’s work on Black business in Hip-Hop. Salt n Pepa sing ‘we wanna get paid’ for all the right reasons). And the examples can be multiplied - its a sad joke to think there might possibly still be a band somewhere slogging along the pub circuit night after night just doing that shit for a meagre living and not someday hoping for that famed ‘discovery’ which leads to contracts, mega-sales and limousines (or at least free tickets to the MTV awards). Stranger things could happen I suppose, but we’d all laugh.
Yet there is room to think about music as revolutionary in other senses. There is much to be said for those musicians who attempt to provoke their audiences to think about contemporary issues, or at least to think at all. And while too many fans of Billy Bragg will sing along to the workers’ flag without stopping to consider the context and history of that song (and there are other less obvious examples), the place of popular music within the cultures of the Left has a significance that should be fostered. We all like to dance, well many of us do (sorry those who are complete klutzes and know it. Myself, I will happily make a fool of myself on the dance floor - I don’t get thrown off too often). The problem is, however, that the Left and music still seems to be mired in a simple equation of folk and message and militant content (arcane form).
But the revolutionary place of music requires more justification than as some kind of mass communication shorthand capable of reaching those who have been dissuaded from purchasing Left literature on the High Street by Newspaper-sellers from hell. Nor can it be just some kind of cultural therapy cum release valve for after the demo and/or to raise money for jailed comrades/campaigns/printing presses and so forth. There are more interesting things going on in clubs, homes and the ’scene’ (wherever that interzone reality is today - SimCity 2000 I guess), and most excellent, for example, has been the evolution of the campaign against the criminal justice bill/act from being a gut-reaction defence of right to party into a wider youth politicisation which recognises Government as the racist, capitalist, bigot-enemy trying systematically to renovate a tired imperialist backwater… Yeah yeah
This is not some Pied Piper evangelism but something rather more modest or experimental. I propose to consider music and sound as disharmonious accompaniment to the conventions of Western metaphysical thinking, or at least as a possible contrapuntal melody which could sound out a critique of capitalism. This would be well beyond the conventional folksy version of lefty music, but in some degree extrapolated therefrom, and certainly requiring studious attention to the minutia of Marxist argumentation (too often the dull and grim struggle of the sloganeering Left allow people to skive off the hard work of having to read those old texts. No easy task, but there’s no avoiding it either).
Basically the first and most general step in my argument is that music is not just there. Its a communal thing, produced, performed and heard in a context. Today that context is, to a lesser or greater extent, at the productive margins of Capitalism - be it rave/tekno or bhangra/jungle, banned or platinum, big megabucks production or four-track amateurs, Ice T or Kylie M, or even your local garage grunge/party DJ dreamer, whoever you know. But wherever and whatever it is, music can be considered over against, even resistant
To demonstrate this more clearly it is easiest to consider the technology. The point is that a recording inscribed in the form of minute grooves on vinyl or strings of numbers on a three-inch circular diskette capable of laser translation (or whatever - how do they do that?) is not yet music. There must always be a playing and a listening for there to be sound - and this listening is not the simple consumption of clichéd economics. There are moments of consumption, but what is required, in the age of digital reproduction, is an evaluation of the repetitive listenings brought into availability by these technologies. With a CD, but also with musical notation, with the vinyl album, and even with the rehearsed performance, the sound is remade over and over by each listening, just as each reading of a text is a new bringing forth. Endlessly. This must be dealt with in terms of the labour theory of value as understood by Marx in the latter sections of Capital (and modified in part given new understandings of the status of endless playings of a CD and the availability of on-line clips down on radio.cyber.caf - again given the co-constitutive ‘labour’ of the listener). The labour that is required to produce an object, or objects - in this case a CD, CD player, speakers and all other costs - is labour that has been stolen from labourers by capitalist investors. Although the co-ordination of capitalism enables mass production and distribution, it is on the basis of this co-ordination, and ownership of the means of production, distribution etc, that capitalists are able to exploit the inequity of a process where work is not paid according to its return, the value it creates on the market. Basically, a very long story which must be read in detail, amounts to the theft of labour by a bunch of old men in suits, and others not so old, with ponytails and sportscars, but also in suits. This theft of value extends, I think it can be argued, to the various forms of ‘work’ it is necessary for you to do in order to be in a position to be a listener, and so make music. This co-constitution of sound requires us to rethink consumption as production subsumed within a capitalism which colonises all aspects of life (Marx’s ‘real subsumption’ discussed in Capital vol 3 would be usefully elaborated - a reading offered by the lyrical Antonio Negri begins this work - see Marx Beyond Marx). Hmmm. That sounds too difficult, check it out though. It may be right. And it makes us focus upon the communal context of music in a more sophisticated way than previous lefty-folky musicism. Get back to me.
Instead of exploring the endless permutations and distinctions of this part of a sophisticated labour theory of value project (its too long and winding a road, but I am trying to get back to it), it is possible to draw in other interesting works for similar ends. In a related register it might also be suggested that a recording is a kind of negative. Not only as a product, but certainly essential for the structure of capital which requires a purchase and a development on the part of the listener/consumer. It is clear that a recording is not yet the sound, and never can be, and must be decoded or - excuse the German - ‘aufhebung’ if it is to become sound. A performer must play the piece, read the notation, or a CD must be put into the player and the play button pressed, etc. Further development of this point would require a difficult contemplation of the ontological status of the negative (check out the down rhythms of Giorgio Agamben’s Language and Death) and its relation to the dialect-ic (see that old beat philosopher and techno DJ Martin Heidegger who asks in Sein und Zeit ‘why does every dialectic take refuge in negation…’ 332). The recording as somehow the negation of sound itself negated to produce sound
“23914034u2pjdfsdr034130eu 3-434 4230423052054909483ru 2u2340032409 23 23984092374523 402934 0923420394 32r428r4209357v3875oieuwr4999435 v 8u5 34 340475 30035734057 [549890583589--459] -348543895h47h493n9j4999″ (fifth symphony, first two bars)
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footnote one. Is sound-voice something more primary than the language which both depends upon it and is made possible by it, but which is separate from it? Language in itself has no voice. Language is, but needs more to sound itself. Without this negativity - the non-immediacy - of language/sound there would be no way of distinguishing voice/music. In immediacy every possibility of indicating the event of language disappears, hence without negativity (or abstraction/separation?), no language, no music, no culture, no exploitation, no war, no death, no thought, no ice-cream. All knowledge presupposes the voice, but must be separate from the voice. From sounding. This makes music priory and contra capital.
John Hutnyk - first published in Versus Magazine, issue 4, 1995.
Silence: on Music and Politics. thoughts to add to the word hoard, and for a Royal Holloway Talk given on thursday about Hip Hop in Europe, focussing on repetitions and the refusal of Paul Simon to give Fun^da^mental clearance to sample his Sounds of Silence track, while he of course made himself into Mr World Music dubbing little guitar ditties over the music of Odulum… (see my earlier rant on Mr Simon here)
So, I start with the theme of repetition, and so the usual starting point… “Elvis said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture” (see C of E book – its Elvis Costello I mean of course). I see a certain category error here which is in danger of rendering writing speechless.
This may be a conceptual rather than technical error. Aldous Huxley wrote of an assault on silence on the part of technology but today silencing seems to shout out to us at every corner - censorship terrorizes us exponentially.
Cage suggests that silence cannot exist except as an ideal, Attali argues that it is the political arrangement of sounds that organizes society, Burroughs wants to tamper with the audio track of control.
It makes some sense then to still think that the politics of music is not to be wholly abandoned to Musicology.
The situation is bifurcated, on the one hand sound offers a critique of the dominant visual privilege in culture, often remarked (see Swedenburg on how hip-hop becomes the vehicle of Muslim youth protest in Europe). On the other hand sound also implies surveillance, eavesdropping, order words and control (Attali, “Noise”) and the ways music is co-opted to the culture industry EVERY time. There is reason to battle over sounds and silence, over censorship and co-option – who will sing these songs of freedom, and on what label?)
I am amused to find that RZA from Wu Tang Clan scored both Ghost Dog and Kill Bill. (See Ko Banerjea in “Travel Worlds” talking about this sort of eastern promise, and also Vijay Prashad’s “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting”.)
Meanwhile… I am becoming obsessed with backwards messages in music as a way to rethink the whole exoticist fascination/distinction and categorisation obsession of ethnomusicology. Edgard Varese describes an alleged difference between Western and Eastern music - citing one of his Indian students who thought Western music jerky and edgy he writes ‘To them, apparently, our Western music seems to sound much as it sounds to us when a record is played backwards’ and Varese then conducts his own quaintly charming experiment: ‘playing a Hindu record of a melodic vocalization backward, I found that I had the same smooth flow as when played normally, scarcely altered at all’ (Varese 1936 P 20 of “Audio Culture”)
What is it to play a Hindu record ‘normally’? And to then compare it to ‘our’ Western, clearly more dynamic or developmental, music in a way reminiscent of Hegel reading the Gita as described by Gayatri Spivak in “Critique of Postcolonial Reason”
As if George Martin was doing anything strange when reversing tapes for the Beatles White Album experiments (Paul is dead)
Or William Burroughs and Brion Gysin cut up exercises just purchased for the New York archive. Twin Peaks has a room in which all speech runs backwards. We are no longer surprised by this sort of roundabout.
Topsy Turvy world in the “Magic Faraway Tree” books of Enid Blyton was my original reason for wanting to know about anthropology… but the whole repetition/backwards message thing has been done to death - The Beatles not only, also Led Zep, Styx, you name it - The Rutles…
Of course I pointed out how the reversibility of recorded music was crucial to scratching in hip hop – not that we always got to source things back to Bam and Herc. There is much more to riff on here yet… something about the bleating repetitions of the war-mongering types marching up and down the corridors of the West Wing (yes you Prez Barlett!) chanting “War on Terror, War on Terror” - itself a sampling of Ronnie and Nance Reagan when they were there - bouncing on the bed cackling with glee about their “War on Drugs, War on Drugs” - and all this clearly about quotation, plagiarism, copying, so writing, in the age of digital repro-dunkings, and so much in debt to Pynchon…
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Imogen, you should definitely wake up today to check this out. Feb 21st is the anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, 158 years ago. (thanks Rana).
Marx and Engels Internet Archive
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Book changed the world,
by the most important social scientist ever.
Old Beardo.
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This pic is from a recent celebration - heh heh. bleary eyed the next day (in fact already here - those magaritas were fine).
Anyway, Klaus Peter Koepping is coming to Goldsmiths to teach for the next year. This below is from Celebrating Transgression - a festschrift for him. This is the start of my paper. More to come…
From ‘Method in the Madness’ in “Celebrating Transgression” (forthcoming Nov - see the books blog).
1.1 The idea that anthropology is about one culture understanding another, in some sort of binary exchange mechanism, seems absurd. There are no distinct cultures, understandings are multiple. Balance sheets are false documents. But these absurdities are the ethic of anthropology, as a trickster discipline, conjuring its way to a faulty comprehension (Köpping 1989). Ethnographers might lie. They might be brilliant. They might be government spies, or worse, revolutionaries. In an anxious history, the drive to rethink culture must engage with diversity, media, commerce and yet is nothing if it does not encourage the opening of minds that only transgressive quest(ion)ing can ensure.
1.2 Reinventing anthropology could be imagined as a project of recognising differences so as to work an overcoming in equality that preserves them. In Gayatri Spivak’s reading of Marx we hear of a ‘system that will remove difference after taking it into account’ (Spivak 1999: 79). This might even be something like the structure of anthropological reportage in a Malinowskian world, where difference is revealed as not so different – the point might be to radicalise this towards its revolutionary implications. The move from reportage to intervention is a not so unusual ambition. If the structure of ethnographic motivation was to say ‘look how these strange people are not all that strange after all’, then the political task of ensuring equity despite acknowledged differences is only the next step. Here there would not be talk of rights to difference, but of rights to (and the responsibilities of) equality.
1.3 The archive of ethnography shifts and grows exponentially, but only sometimes escapes the impulse to itemise, even as we try to theorise the innovations of the system. If anything, perhaps it is the grand expositions, such as that in 1851 at the
1.4 The curriculum that demands a critical rethink might claim many avatars. We should not be surprised to find anthropologists that do not fit the canon. Other ways of writing the trajectory of the discipline have been offered. Alternative versions ask urgent political, conceptual, dialectical questions and evoke names not usually present, texts scavenged and refashioned through critique. Popular interdisciplinarity recasts everything afresh. This is in part learned from Peter Köpping’s lectures on Anthropology and Method, here and there updated over the years in a file seasoned with engagement, teaching, reading, activism.
1.5 Most important of all, the critique of mediocrity – the gilt-edged mediocrity of those in positions of privilege incapable of anything other than marching in place with that privilege, incapable of challenging even themselves or the perseverance that put them here in the first place. Who do I have in mind? Certain professors of culture at work in the bureaucratic teaching machine, dull operatives of self-promotion and resignation, luxuriant in egoistic privilege, imagining conference attendance and canteen dinners amount to a jet-set lifestyle – these people thrive on a capitulation to the administrative job that makes the capacity for critical thought a mere line on a curriculum vitae.
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| Gordon Mclean on Dragnet Goldsmiths |
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