Playing the Future: Improvisation and Nomadic Utopia

A couple of months back I produced a pamphlet (and gave a talk) for the Psykick Dancehall and Jon Marshall curated exhibition Thinking Ourselves into Existence at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (full text below). The exhibition explored the social and political relevance of improvised and experimental music and featured works by Psykick Dancehall; curated readings and listenings; and pamphlets by Psykick Dancehall and Jon Marshall, Adam Harper, Ben Watson, Marie Thompson and Paul Hegarty. My pamphlet was entitled Playing the Future: Improvisation and Nomadic Utopia, and can be downloaded here, read below, or bought here. One can only speculate what Watson would make of its use of Deleuzean nomadic thought to read improvisation (and perhaps of improvisation to read Deleuzean nomadic thought)…

My thoughts have developed a little since I wrote this – I think I’d be even more cautious about improvisation’s utopianism now (I like Foucault’s idea of ‘hyper-pessimistic activism’), though I still think the key arguments are relevant. Paul Hegarty’s pamphlet (which you can buy here) perhaps offers a slightly more cautious counterpoint to my own piece. Anyway, you can read the piece below the picture…

“When I close my eyes and I am just playing with other people in a free situation, where we can all do what we want, I am in a utopian space. And I have been very lucky to spend a huge amount of my life in that utopian space.” Evan Parker, in an interview given to Stewart Lee, 2010

The fundamental argument of this essay is that the practice of collectively improvising music creates utopian space. But this is by no means a self-evident truth: it cannot simply be said that the space of improvising music is a utopia which solves problems of social and political organisation once and for all, for improvisation is an inherently muddy phenomena, frequently constituted by frustrations and failure. Though the adjective ‘utopian’ has been used to describe the practice of collectively improvising music, (1) an investigation into exactly how its utopianism operates and what its utopia might look like is necessary before the claim can be taken seriously; and even then there are limits to improvisation’s utopianism. Nonetheless, I believe that the claim can be taken seriously and that these limits need not prove fatal. There is a utopianism inherent to improvisation.

Before this argument can be developed further, it needs to be established precisely what is meant by the term ‘collectively improvising music’. I use the phrase to refer to the activity of creating music in a group of people without reference to any ideal/limitation determining how the music created can, or should, sound; or which determines the relation- ships between musicians. (2) An infinite number of possibilities should be open to each musician at all times during the creation of music. (3) Ideals/limitations and hierarchies may be formally predetermined before the music is created or they may emerge during the performance itself, and they may be recognised or unrecognised by the performers. Fol- lowing a score or agreeing before the performance to play in 7/8 time would be recognised factors, whilst the impact of music the performers

had listened to at any time in their lives prior to improvising might be recognised (“let’s do something that sounds like Can”) but would, without a doubt, place parameters on the performance that went unrecognised – as would the emotional state of the musicians, the temperature in the room, the musician’s life histories and innumerable other affective inputs. Playing in a certain time signature, scale or key may also emerge during the performance and may not be consciously recognised by the musicians if this is the case. In terms of relationships, meanwhile, improvisation is built on non-hierarchical relationships between musicians – there are no leaders in an improvising collective.

Making music free of these ideals/limitations is, of course, impossible in its pure state (just as it would be impossible to create ‘fully composed’ music that gave performers absolutely no freedom of choice regarding how to play, at least so long as the performers were human). This means that improvised music should not, therefore, be seen as exist- ing in a binary opposition with ‘composed’ music. (4) Rather, all human musical performance operates on a spectrum running from these two inaccessible poles: music is improvised to the extent that performers are free to explore the infinite for its entire duration and it is composed to the extent that they run up against ideals/limitations which prevent that exploration.

Like improvisation, utopia is a muddy concept: it too is littered with frustration and failure. I argue that there are two poles of utopia: the ‘nomadic utopia’ and the ‘State Utopia’. Like improvisation and com- position, they form the opposite ends of a spectrum rather than existing in binary opposition, and cannot be realised in their pure states. A good starting point for exploring these poles is the etymological double entendre of Thomas More’s term: utopia is caught between ‘euto- pia’ (good place) and ‘outopia’ (no place): ‘the good place that is no place’.

The only thing clear here is that utopia is a place. In arguing that the practice of improvising music creates a utopia (more accurately, it creates a nomadic utopia) it is necessary, therefore, to consider how it is possible to speak of musical production as a place. Here, I draw on the definition offered by the geographer Doreen Massey, who argues that ‘place’ is “constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular lo- cus” (2004: 69). There is a danger of circularity in this definition as ‘locus’ is Latin for place, and to avoid this, I understand the term in the mathematical sense, where it refers to a collection of points which share a property. The ‘points’ here would be the musicians; the shared property their desire to create music together – either in a particular style or through a particular process. In this sense, then, it is possible to think about a group of musicians working together as constituting a ‘place’, with the ‘locus’ being the music they create.

In order to understand this place of musical production as a utopia it is necessary to consider it as a ‘good place’ and a ‘no place’. Here, two rival definitions of the ‘good’ come into play. The State Utopia (which conforms to colloquial understandings of the term as a per- fect place separated from the present by time or space) is constituted by the ‘moral good’, in which that which is good conforms to univer- sal laws and speaks to a vision of perfection. It sees itself as “divine, transcendent, superior to life” (Delueze, 1986: 122), judging and orienting action from a location beyond the material present. This location is the State Utopia, a place in which all actions conform to this particular moral vision. Hierarchy is necessary to enforce this conformity and deny difference, meaning that the only form of free- dom is a negative freedom; in the words of the utopian scholar J.C. Davis, Utopia provides “freedom from disorder and moral chaos, freedom from moral choice altogether” (1981: 384).

This, clearly, is antithetical to the social organisation of improvising collectives. Indeed, it seems to offer a description of the orchestra, in which individual players are generally given no freedom to explore or pursue their own interests, and in which a strict hierarchy – flowing from conductor down through soloists, the first violinist, section leaders, and so on – enforces the strict moral ordering of the composer, whose score functions as an object of ‘perfection’. Like those living in a State Utopia, the orchestral musician has “accepted a discipline which is totalitarian in its scope and denial of human individuality” (Davis, 1981: 54). (5)

Whilst Davis is an advocate of (State) Utopia, he shares with its detractors a belief that it is ‘totalitarian’ in scope, denying the in- dividual the capacity to act on their own desires, or create their own conditions for life. For many (myself included), this would be a fundamentally dystopian state of affairs where the totality utterly dominates the individual. Marylou Speaker – a violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra – notes that “the more successful we are as instrumentalists, the more we have to sublimate our individuality…. to the tyranny of the conductor… players in an orchestra have to submit, instant by instant, to the dictates of a single individual… every movement you make, in the music that is the substance of your being, is dictated to you by others” (quoted in Fischer, 1994: 28).

This is clearly a long way from the experience of improvising musicians, so how might it be possible to use the term ‘utopia’ to describe the spaces they create? To do so requires a different understanding of the concept of ‘the good’. Unlike State Utopianism’s moral good, the nomadic utopia orients itself around an ‘ethical good’. Drawing on the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze, this can be under- stood as that which unfolds immanently and increases the capacity of those present in a space to act. This should not be understood simply as a reversal of the domination of the collective over the individual found in State Utopianism, however. Rather, it collapses the binary opposition between the individual and the collective: the ability of one to act from their position of difference increases the ability of the collective to act: an increase in the power of one increases the power of all, meaning power is distributed and produced non-hierarchically (and indeed, the imposition or emergence of hierarchy is damaging to such power). (6) As such, the concept of the ‘individual’ is replaced by the ‘dividual’, someone who – in the words of Lewis Hyde – is “con- stituted by the complexity of the world around him [sic]”. To be a dividual is to know that “we are always simultaneously individuals and sunk in our communities” (Hyde and Wallace, 2010: online at http:// bombsite.powweb.com). An increase in the power of the individual results in an increase in the power of the collective, and vice versa.

The nomadic utopia is made (and remade) by these productive operations of power, meaning it exists in a state of becoming. It is like Heraclitus’ river “which is not the same and is” (2003: 51), or Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizophrenic object” which can- not be understood without reference to the forces that produce it (2004: 6). It is a residue of materialist utopianism and not the telos of idealist Utopianism; a prefigurative space in the im- manent here-and-now that is open to becoming; not a perfect- ed space in a transcendent future which is closed to becoming.

I believe that the place of musical improvisation is a nomadic utopia. In it, dividual musicians assert their difference through their playing, yet this asserted difference does not deny the dif- ference of fellow improvisers. Rather, each player responds to the difference of the other players and adapts their own out- put accordingly. This is often described as ‘nobody solos, ev- erybody solos’, although I prefer George Lewis’ term ‘multi-dominance’ (2000): a nonhierarchical arrangement in which the ex- pression of power is not dependent on others occupying a position of powerlessness. (7)

This nonhierarchical multidominance unfolds immanently, mean- ing that the music created cannot be known in advance – nor can the specific form the social relations between the players will take. This is the essence of the nomadic utopia which, as noted above, results from – rather than creates – utopianism. In the liner notes to Change of the Century, Ornette Coleman notes that “[w]hen our group plays, before we start out to play, we do not have any idea what the end result will be. Each player is free to contribute what he feels in the music at any given moment. We do not begin with a precon- ceived notion as to what kind of effect we will achieve” (2006: 253).

It is important, however, not to forget the ‘no’ in utopia’s ety- mology. As I noted above, it is impossible to create music that is purely improvised, and the nomadic utopia cannot be actualised in its pure state. Even if no hierarchy or ideal/limitation is placed upon musicians before they begin to play, they will emerge as a performance progresses. A key or rhythm may be settled upon, or multidominance may give way to dominance by a single play- er or a section of the collective. These moments may be among the most powerful in improvisation – the feeling that a band has really hit its ‘groove’ and synced around a spontaneously created order – and they may well be necessary, moments of recupera- tion, of taking stock of gains achieved. (8) Heraclitus’ river is not a site of pure becoming, remember – it is “not the same and is” – and such synchronisations are perhaps necessary to give a sense of cohesion, identity and continuity to the nomadic utopia; they enable it to have a name, to be more than undifferentiated chaos.

Yet they are also moments which lessen the extent to which the music is improvised, and as the mode of musical creation moves along the spectrum away from the pole of improvisation and to- wards the pole of composition, the musical place moves along the utopian spectrum away from the pole of nomadic utopia towards the pole of State Utopia. Tyrannies of habit may emerge – informal hierarchies which show that it is not enough to simply overthrow formal hierarchies and declare the end of history . In Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed an anarchist (nomadic) utopia, in which there are no formal hierarchies, slides towards State Utopia/ dystopia as habit becomes ossified into moral order, with those who question this order alienated from the society. Change becomes something to be resisted; the society begins to close itself off to the future. Tom Moylan cautions against such an occurrence, and his words could equally apply to improvising musicians ‘in sync’:

Remember to be historically vigilant, do not lock in the utopi- an achievement, do not  remove the social utopia from the pro- cesses of time. Don’t cut a deal with the false utopian devil of your own collective imagination as it dreams of the end of his- tory; and don’t cover up the deal by changing the [utopia] from that of a place-in-process to one of eternal delight…[do] not let the processes of learning and change end (2000: 15).

The ‘no’ in utopia’s etymology, therefore, should serve to remind the improvising collective that they must not settle permanently on any given order; that they must always look to keep the musical space open to the unknowable future. Improvisation creates utopia, and it must do so continuously.

What, then, can improvisation do on a larger scale? What sort of role might it play in a more ‘macro level’ nomadic utopianism? A small one, of course: improvisation is not going to save the world, and it would be a mistake to simply extrapolate from the specific micropolitics of improvisation to tackle the messy dystopia of neoliberal capital. Yet I do believe that improvisation can play a role, no matter how small. It can teach people the joys of nonhierarchy, and help us understand that there is not a necessary war between the interests of the collective and the interests of the individual. Similarly, the techniques used by improvisers to overcome problems of hierarchy and lack of ideas may suggest techniques applicable to those involved in nonhierarchical forms of social organisation and political action (and vice versa).

And of course there are problems relating to exclusivity which must be addressed before improvisation can truly be hailed as even the smallest part of political movement. Whilst my focus in this essay has been on improvisation as a practice rather than a genre (or an umbrella term encompassing a number of sub-genres in the jazz and improv traditions), serious questions need to be asked about why improvisation is so dominated by men; why there are still racial divides; and why queer and many other minority issues are so absent from the discourses and practises of improvisation (including this discourse, I should add). A nomadic utopia needs difference; it thrives on difference: it cannot be an exclusive, privileged sphere. Discussions must therefore take place around the practice of col- lective improvisation to ensure that it becomes a space in which all those who want to take part can do so (not everyone, of course, wants to make music – and some may simply prefer to play com- posed pieces: that is fine, and I would not suggest this means they are likely to have ‘bad’ politics). (10)

Improvisation is indeed a muddy, contested practice. But so is utopia - and by getting our hands dirty and engaging, we might just be able to move towards a freer, fairer, more exciting world for all. In the utopian community he founded at New Lanark (just thirty miles south-east from this gallery) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Robert Owen established a number of musical groups – choirs, orchestras and brass bands – believing they ‘had the capacity to break down barriers and offer the opportunities for collective activities that would foster friendship and cooperation’ (Davison, 2010: 234). Whilst there were disconcertingly hierarchical aspects to Owen’s use of music (it could, he asserted, create “obedience and order in the most imperceptible and pleasant manner” [quoted in Davison, 2010: 238]), the use of music to help create community is inspiring. We can only imagine the joys that a nomadic utopia which replaced the brass bands with free improvisation collectives might obtain as they played the future into existence.

Notes

1 See, for example, Cox and Warner (2002: 251-252), Fred Van Hove (online at http://enotes.com) and Evan Parker (2010: online at http://guardian.co.uk).

2 I write this term as such because an ideal necessarily imposes a limitation on possi- bility – if you are a cellist performing Elgar’s Cello Concerto it is not possible (or at least not permitted) to start using the body of the cello as a percussive body, for example. It should also be noted that improvising collectives might involve non-human actors: computers, animals, cyborgs, the acoustics of the room – although I do not consider these in this essay.

3 Initially, it may seem that this commitment to infinity would require each impro- viser to have infinite musical talent and a continuously tuned and instantly responsive instrument capable of synthesising all possible sounds. This fails to understand that there are near infinite potentials within discrete parameters, however, not least when notions of playing an instrument ‘properly’ are abandoned, and when there is more than one person involved in the production of music.

4 Indeed, I have been tempted to reject the term ‘improvisation’ in favour of ‘in- stant composition’. This would draw on Adam Harper’s insight that “technically, the word ‘composer’ suggests anyone at all who might create music. In this sense, the term overlaps with the word ‘performer’. Composers may also come in groups that collaborate on the creation of music” (2010: 7). As the term improvisation is more clearly recognised, however, I am inclined to stick with it.

5 In line with my earlier comment that it is impossible to have music in which per- formers always have an infinite number of options open to them, it is impossible to perform music which leaves no space for individuality on behalf of the perform- ers. However, the degree of freedom an orchestral musician is given is likely to be miniscule, with soloists, or those at the very top of the orchestral hierarchy the only musicians truly permitted to stamp their individuality on a piece (the conductor, of course, has relative autonomy in deciding how a composer’s instructions are to be interpreted). It should be noted that this has not always been the case, however, and many baroque compositions left significant space for musicians to improvise within a given set of parameters.

6 In his Ethics, Spinoza calls this understanding of power potentia, and distinguishes it from postesas, which is power as domination (2000).

7 For Lewis, the concept of multidominance is Afrological, and is central to a great deal of art (both visual and sonic) from the African diaspora. Though he notes this is “historically emergent rather than ethnically essential” (2002: 217), for a fuller ac- count of improvisation’s utopianism the way in which social histories have informed its development would need to be taken into account.

8 A process of pure flux would be overwhelming; chaos without the potential for self-ordering. Angela Carter’s novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is set in a society in total flux, and its narrator – Desidero – is so overwhelmed by the constant play of difference that he “only has one desire: that everything stop” (2011: 2), an experience that many who have played (or listened to) improvised music may well be able to relate to.

9 The writings of the ‘postanarchist’ Saul Newman are of relevance here. See, in particular, p.47-51 of From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power.

10 I would suggest that these discussions take the form of popular education work- shops. Popular education – a form of radically inclusive learning largely developed in Latin America – is, I argue, another nomadic practice which has a number of striking similarities with the practice of free improvisation (see Bell, 2010: online at http:// ceasefiremagazine.co.uk)

Works Cited

Bell, David (2010) ‘The Shape of Education to Come’, online at http://cease- firemagazine.co.uk/deserters-songs-5/ (accessed 31/1/12)

Carter, Angela (2011) The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, London: Penguin Coleman, Ornette (2006) ‘Change of the Century’ in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, London: Continuum, pp. 253-254

Cox, Christoph and Warner, Daniel (2006) ‘Improvised Musics: Introduction’ in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, London: Continuum, pp. 251-252

Davis, J.C. (1981) Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516- 1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davison, Lorna (2010) ‘A Quest for Harmony: The Role of Music in Robert Owen’s New Lanark Community’, Utopian Studies, 21(2), pp. 232-251

Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson, London: Continuum

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix (2004) Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane, London: Continuum

Fischer, Marilyn (1994) ‘The Orchestral Workplace’ in Journal of Social Philosophy, 25 (3), pp. 26-39

Harper, Adam (2010) Infinite Music, Winchester: Zero Books

Heraclitus (2003) Fragments, trans. Brooks Haxton, New York: Penguin

Hyde, Lewis and Wallace, Chris (2010) ‘Commons Sense: Lewis Hyde’ online at http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=13127 (accessed 06/02/12, 3.30pm)

Lee, Stewart (2010) ‘Evan Parker’s Musical Utopia’ in The Guardian, online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/22/stewart-lee-evan-parker (accessed 6/1/2012, 8pm)

Le Guin, Ursula K. (2006) The Dispossesed: An Ambiguous Utopia, London: Gollancz

Lewis, George (2002) ‘Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives’ in Black Music Research Journal, volume 22, supplement, pp. 215-246

Lewis, George (2000) ‘Too many notes: computers, complexity and culture in voy-ager’, in Leonardo Music Journal 10, pp.33-39

Massey, Doreen (2004) ‘A Global Sense of Place’ in Tim Creswell, eds. Place: A Short Introduction, Malden: Blackwell, pp.63-74

Moylan, Tom (2000) Scraps of the Untainted Sky: science fiction, utopia, dystopia, Boulder: Westview Press

Newman, Saul (2007) From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, Lanham: Lexington Books

Spinoza, Baruch (2000) Ethics, trans. George Parkinson, Oxford: Oxford University Press

What is this that stands before me? Dissonance and utopia

Below is an edited version of the talk I gave at Nottingham Contemporary on the 8th December last year as part of their Klaus Weber exhibition public programme. I also produced a commissioned piece of music – based around the tritone – with Surfacing, which we played in the gallery itself. We are currently working on a recorded version. Watch this space…

 Nottingham: 2011

Hanging from the ceiling of Nottingham Contemporary art gallery is a giant windchime. With two fans angled towards it, it is tuned to emit only dissonant intervals and spreads a palpable unease throughout the gallery.

‘Long Dark Windchime (Arab Tritone)’ is a work by the German artist Klaus Weber, and forms part of his solo exhibition ‘If you leave me I’m not coming’. It’s a powerful piece: the carefully tuned steel tubes producing a rich sound which oscillates gently as it spreads throughout the gallery. Among the dissonant intervals it emits is the tritone. An interval spanning six semitones, it is also known as the ‘diabolus in musica’ and has long been associated with Satan: rumours persist that it was banned by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages.

Weber, though, is keen to dispel a straightforward reading of his work as being about evil: speaking at the launch of the exhibition, he stated that he saw the windchime as a hopeful work; a piece that might disrupt the usual operation of our society.

But how is it that something so ominous can be seen as hopeful? Can we really hear dissonance as something related to positive social change? I want to suggest that we can, but doing so will involve a journey through time, space, and some excellent music…

Birmingham: Friday 13th January, 1970

Four young men from Aston release their debut album. There’s pouring rain, thunder, and an ominously tolling bell. Then – from nowhere – an enormous, crushing riff. “What is this that stands before me?”, howls Ozzy Osbourne. Rock music has discovered the devil.

Appropriately enough (though unbeknown to guitarist Tony Iommi), the first two notes of the riff (G and C#) form a tritone, an interval that will go on to become a well-worn trope in heavy metal. (Slayer will even go so far as to name their seventh album Diabolus in Musica.) It’s loved by metallers because it sounds dark and because of the pantomime-ish shock value its Satanic connotations bring to a record. But they aren’t the first to associate it with evil.

Rome: 1322

A papal decree is issued expressing outrage at the increasing prevalence of polyphony in sacred choral music. Of particular concern is the tendency for singers to ‘deprave’ melodies by injecting ‘dissonant’, rather than ‘consonant’ polyphonies. The purpose of the decree is to ‘banish those methods, nay rather to cast them entirely away, and to put them to flight…far from the house of God’. Only on feast days or in the ‘solemn celebrations of the Mass’ will the use of ‘some consonances’ be permitted. It is polyphonic dissonance that is banned, then, and not the tritone per se.

This decree reflects a long running suspicion of dissonance in Catholic thought. As far back as the second century the Roman philosopher Gaudentius warned against dissonant intervals because ‘when they are produced simultaneously…[they] never seem to be the same in any part of the musical sound [and] do not show any evidence of blending with each other’.   Dissonant intervals not sounded simultaneously (including the tritone) were also frowned upon by the church, though I can find no evidence to support the oft-repeated claim that they were ever subject to an outright ban: indeed they featured in choral and instrumental sacred music throughout the Middle Ages, with the tritone often used to signify Satan or the crucifixion of Christ. They remain subject to strict rules, however –  typified by Prosdocimus de Beldemandis’ Tractatus de Contrapuncto of 1412 – which orders that ‘if the listener has been disturbed by the harmonies in the course of the counterpoint, at the end he must be inspired with harmonies more dulcet and amicable by nature’.

This distrust of dissonance was not exclusive to the Catholic Church, though. In Ancient Greece it was seen as a threat to ‘harmony’ – which was understood not as the pleasant organisation of musical sounds but as a principle of cosmological and social order – a view also evidenced in the writings of the Chinese historian Sima Qian who – around the 2nd Century BC – claimed that ‘music honours harmony; it spreads spiritual influence and is in conformity with heaven: when the rites and music are clear and complete, heaven and earth fulfil their normal functions’.

This ‘pleasant organisation’ has traditionally been understood as ‘consonance’ and has close ties with the concept of ‘unity’: in the 13th Century John of Garland argued that polyphonic consonance referred to a group of notes heard as a single sound, whilst in dissonant combinations the tones could not be aggregated into a coherent whole.

*         *        *        *

The fear of dissonance, then, stems not so much from the fact that it sounds in some sense evil or ugly, but from the fact that when sounded consecutively, dissonant tones appear unresolved; and when sounded consecutively they appear riddled by disunity. In the words of the musicologist Dane Rudhyar, ‘consonances are static, dissonances dynamic…as long as a dissonance is not resolved into a consonance suspense reigns. Fulfilment [and] satisfaction come as the consonance is sounded’. Consonance, then, is settled and content; and whether peaceful or triumphant it upholds the status quo. Dissonance is emphatically not; it sticks out, refuses to ‘blend in’. It unsettles the status quo.

Music, then, takes on a moral dimension: it is Good when it conforms to the natural laws of harmony and Evil when it does not. But there is nothing ‘natural’ about this moral order: it is promoted by those with an interest in preserving the status quo. Dissonance in music is feared because it might foster social dissonance, and so it needs to regulated by ‘morality’.

New Lanark: 1790-1800

 

In the late eighteenth century, Robert Owen founds a utopian community in the Scottish mill town of New Lanark. Keen for it develop a sense of unity, he promotes a programme of music and dancing for residents, believing this will provide ‘health, unaffected grace to the body, teach obedience and order in the most imperceptible and pleasant manner and create peace and happiness in the mind’.

In an article on the political and social function of music in New Lanark, Lorna Davison noted that it ‘was almost universally perceived’ by visitors to the community to ‘transform the members of this otherwise very ordinary Scottish factory community in a way so unexepected, remarkable, and noteworthy, into graceful, elegant, happy, and healthy citizens, living together in harmony’ (interestingly, Owen would go on to attempt a similar experiment in Indiana. Its name? – New Harmony).

With consonant music playing an important tole, Owen’s utopia can be seen as one of consonance. His is a dream of finality, of resolution, of the end of struggle: the tierce da Picardie as the End of History.

This seems to forget a key aspect of utopia, however. The term – coined by Thomas More – comes from the Greek for good (eu), no (ou) and place (topos): the good place that is no place. But with Owen, the ‘ou’ is forgotten: utopia becomes the morally good place in which life conforms to universal principles and from which no further improvement can be imagined. Dissonance has been expunged.

Though I have a lot of time for Owen and his experiment at New Lanark, there is something incredibly troubling about his consonant utopianism. Problems of political organisation cannot be resolved once and for all, and attempts to do so require unacceptable levels of hierarchical control (why, we must ask, can the inhabitants of New Lanark not transform their own community?). The consonant utopia becomes a totalitarian dystopia; the happy harmonies of cherubic youths morph into muzak, a sound both mind-numbingly boring and disturbingly authoritarian (‘the security system of the 1970s’, as the Muzak Corporation claimed in their adverts). What place is there for dissonance in this harmonic order?

We need, then, to theorise a utopianism which does not seek an ultimate resolution in harmony; which utilises dissonance rather than consonance as an ordering principle. Perhaps this ‘dissonant utopianism’ might be the ‘peculiar’ kind of hope that Weber ascribed to his dissonant windchime. But where might we find it…?

Vienna, 1924

 

In an essay entitled ‘Opinion or Insight’, the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg speaks of ‘emancipation of the dissonance’. Surveying the history of western music, he constructs a grand narrative in which musical intervals have gradually shifted in time from being perceived as dissonant to consonant. This, he argues, has reached its logical conclusion in the twelve-tone technique he is pioneering, in which the terms dissonance and consonance – dependent upon each other for their meaning – cease to have any relevance at all. He believes that this new form of music will come to dominate in the future.

Like consonant utopians, Schoenberg believes in an End of History (he is, a Derrida would say, an ‘endist’). But his utopia is not governed by moral principles of consonant harmony. Dissonance is not seen as threatening and is not banished. For him, the twelve-tone technique realises the ultimate triumph of progress over reaction: it is the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment dream. No tones need be excluded from his brave new harmonic order.

Dane Rudhyar – composer, musicologist, spiritualist and friend of Schoenberg’s – recognised the political implications of this, arguing that Schoenberg’s ‘vast and radical attempt at world-regeneration’ creates a ‘dissonant Harmony’ in which dissonance – that which is unstable, that which was previously thought not to belong – is now considered beautiful in its own right. From this he argued that ‘dissonant music is thus the music of true and spiritual Democracy; the music of universal brotherhoods…All democratic units are free and independent; self-sufficient; yet all recognize the Law of the Group, which is in a sense their collective Higher Self’.

There is much to admire in Rudhyar’s claim, but Schoenberg’s ‘emancipation of dissonance’ is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, his grand, emancipatory narrative ignores non-western musics, many of which are centred around what western ears would consider dissonant intervals (a charge which I readily acknowledge could also be levelled at this article). Secondly, the twelve-tone technique (and serialism, which was closely related) threatened to become a hardened law of its own, restricting the ability of composers to experiment with forms, and reducing dissenters to a new position of dissonance. Thirdly, the power to ‘emancipate dissonance’ lay in the hands of a single architect: the composer. Just as Robert Owen saw himself arranging the affairs of the inhabitants of New Lanark, Schoenberg envisaged the composer as a heroic figure creating spaces of freedom: the task of everyone else (the musicians, in this case) was merely to reproduce this order. Fourthly, applying Schoenberg’s musical vision to society would be utopian in the colloquial sense of the word: it would be astonishingly naïve. Socially, at least, dissonance was nowhere near being emancipated in the 1920s. People were – and still are – seen as ‘other’ to the social order, disrupting its harmony due to their skin colour, their religion, their gender, their sexual preferences or their political beliefs. And finally, why does dissonance need to be ‘emancipated’? Is it not an integral part of history and struggle? The task should surely be to emancipate it from its associations with Evil, not eradicate the concept altogether. My next historical jumping-off point illustrates this, and perhaps points towards a more satisfactory conception of dissonant utopianism…

Los Angeles: 1941

Duke Ellington is being interviewed about his music. A record of his is playing on a turntable, and suddenly he asks that the needle be reset so a dissonant chord can be heard again. “That’s the negro’s life”, he says.  “Hear that chord. That’s us. Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part”.

With this short statement Duke Ellington shatters any pretence that societal dissonance has been emancipated. Like the note that makes Gaudentius’ chord dissonant, Ellington – as a black man in a deeply racist society – does not fit.

Yet it’s in playing dissonantly that Ellington’s power really comes to express itself. In his music, dissonance is celebrated. It stands not as something to be resolved into harmony; nor as something to be thrown off in the course of a linear history. Rather, it is an expression of utopanism. This is who we are, it says, and we will create joyous sounds from our marginalisation. And through this celebration, the stigma of dissonance – its association with ‘Evil’ – is made ridiculous, preposterous.

Here, then, dissonance becomes overtly political. But how might we convert the utopianism of Ellington’s chord into a utopia? That is, how might the force Ellington creates into a space of social arrangements? What would a dissonant utopia look like?

Utopia: 2015

 

An occupied warehouse. One of many such occupied spaces that have sprung up across the globe. Hundreds of people live here, organising themselves through consensus decision making and holding property in common. They draw inspiration from utopian communities of the past, including Robert Owen’s New Lanark, but are determined to forge a new way of living without leadership. Cultural activities are important: there’s a gallery, where Weber’s Long Dark Windchime (Arab Tritone) hangs alongside works by community members. And like Owen, these utopians recognise that the performance of music is an important way of ordering their community. Walking round, the visitor is struck by the sheer number of groups making music together: not for an audience, but for themselves.

What kind of music might the visitor to this utopia hear?  All sorts, of course – otherwise it would be a dystopia. But free improvisation might be among the sounds heard. When considered as a practice (rather than as a genre), it suggests an altogether more satisfactory liberation of dissonance: freeing it from moral laws and Eurocentrism, but doing so without the need for a composer to liberate from above. It allows musicians (regardless of ability, training or background) to come together to create music without moral orders determining what can or cannot be played. The music is made with an acknowledgement that no final resolution can – or should – be achieved. The joy is in the process, not the resolution; it exists in a permanent state of flux to which all can contribute.

In this the space of musical improvisation resembles the forms of political organisation which have driven so many global movements in the last fifty years. Without aiming for a predetermined goal, this is a form of organisation which retains a fidelity to the etymology of ‘utopia’, but it’s in a radically different way to consonant utopianism. Following Nietzsche, but this does not mean that it abandons the pursuit of ‘the good’. Rather, it seeks is what might be called an ethical good, which creates new spaces for life and exploration. Dissonance is to be encouraged, for it is from dissonance that we create the new.

Dissonant utopianism does not forget the ‘no’ in utopia’s etymology, however. It acknowledges that utopia cannot be a settled, harmonic state. Rather, it is always constituted by instability – caught like the space between two dissonant notes, it is unresolved, expectant, open to the future.

For Ernst Bloch, the utopian is that which knows the ‘melancholy of fulfillment’ and embodies an ‘ecstatic openness’ to the unknowable future.  Such a claim bares truth to the music theorist Leo Kraft’s statement that ‘the most beautiful sounds…are usually the most dissonant ones’.

So what is this that stands before us? It’s the future, and we must embrace it in all its uncertainty.

 

On Authority in Popular Education

A follow-up to my earlier post on the riots has just been published over at Bullets and Ballots. In it I advocate popular education as one way in which the energies unleashed in the riots might find a more utopian manner of expression.

Yet despite my belief that popular education must play a key role in social change, there are some difficult issues around hierarchy, domination, power and authority that need to be thought through. These, I think, apply regardless of the situation in which popular education takes place, but are particularly pressing if it is to be successful in Britain’s most deprived areas, where mistrust of authority is likely to be at its highest.

Given that most of those who advocate popular education are of an open/heterodox/humanist Marxist or anarchist persuasion (and I’m speaking from the latter), ‘power’, ‘hierarchy’ and ‘authority’ are generally regarded with suspicion, and ‘domination’ is rejected outright. Popular education appeals precisely because it reverses the vanguardism of Marxist-Leninism: encouraging people to be active in the making of their own futures rather than following pre-determined paths to emancipation. ‘We make the road by walking’- as the title of a book-length exchange between Myles Horton and Paulo Freire has it.

Yet despite the active role that everyone plays in creating their futures in popular education, a number of teacher/theorists argue that it does not completely dispense with the authority of the educator. Here is Freire on this issue in the aformentioned discussion with Horton:

‘I also discovered another thing that was very important to me afterward, that I had authority but I was not authoritarian. I remember that not even one of the students ever left the classroom without telling me or asking me in a very respectful, polite way every time. I began to understand at a very young age that on one hand the teacher as a teacher is not the student. The student as the student is not the teacher. I began to perceive that they are different but not necessarily antagonistic.
The difference is precisely that the teacher has to teach, to experience, to demonstrate authority and the student has to experience freedom in relation to the teacher’s authority. I began to see that the authority of the teacher is absolutely necessary for the development of the freedom of the students , but if the authority of the teacher goes beyond the limits authority has to have in relation to the students’ freedom, then we no longer have authority. We no longer have a freedom. We have authoritarianism’.

From an anarchist perspective this is troubling: ‘authority’ is usually considered something to be avoided, even by those (and I’d include myself here) who draw inspiration from Foucault and argue that anarchism is not about overcoming power, but about overcoming domination and hierarchy (more on this in a minute).

To me, it seems nonsense to expect a student to ask permission from the educator to leave a popular education class. Depending on the circumstances, it might be polite to ask permission of the whole class, or whoever’s speaking- but there could be perfectly legitimate reasons for leaving the class without asking permission from anyone- even without saying anything at all. Expecting a student to defer to the authority of the educator seems a pointless nod to what Max Weber would call ‘rational-legal authority’: the authority that comes with the position of being an educator: an authority, in other words, which comes from a formalised hierarchy. It could also be seen as deferential to what Weber would call ‘traditional authority’- it’s always been the case that you ask permisison of the teacher to leave the room, that’s just ‘how things are done’ (what I would call an ‘ossified hierarchy’). Anarchism is also opposed to such hierarchies; deferring to tradition is almost always a counter-revolutionary action.

The claim that the student has to ‘experience freedom in relation to the teacher’s authority’ is also an odd one. I may be mis-reading Freire here, but this seems to be playing to the liberal myth that freedom is necessarily relational (the freedom of a impinges on the freedom of b) and furthermore, that this is a hierarchical relationship (the freedom of those further down the hierarchy limits the freedom of those at the top). Here, I would argue that these only hold up when there is a hierarchical relationship: as you move towards nonhierarchicy, freedom becomes a social concept: a‘s freedom is no longer in opposition with b‘s; they co-exist and mutually reinforce each other: freedom becomes bound up with power-with, which I discuss below.

In both instances, ‘authority’ presents itself as a legitimate exercise of power-over, or domination. For anarchists, no form of power-over is legitimate (I’m speaking broadly here, of course) and so such authority is unacceptable.

Yet I think that we need to think carefully about the role that ‘charismatic authority’ (Weber’s third kind of authority) can- must- play in popular education. There is no doubt that charisma can be dangerous: when mixed with other forms of authority or power it can facilitate hierarchy and domination of the most destructive kind. But without it, popular education will not get off the ground.

I cannot stress how important this is. Most disaffeted youths would laugh in the face of a popular educator and see the ‘lack of hierarchy in the classroom’ as an excuse to dick about. They would not be able to distinguish between the popular educator and the well-meaning social worker, schoolteacher or police officer who- however polite they might be- will always be ‘on the other side’; will always be ‘the enemy’. The popular educator does not come in the name of hierarchical authority, but that won’t be immediately apparent (and if the popular education is taking place within a coercive setting- a school or young offenders institution, for example, there will be an inescapable element of power-over involved).

I cannot emphasise the above point enough: I’ve been the teacher (in a mainstream setting) who thinks that by being nice they’ll automatically get students on their side, and I had a rude awakening; classes were way out of my control and routinely took advantage of my kindness. Now I ethically object to trying to impose either traditional or legal-rational authority to work my way out of this situation (and it would have proved useless: I looked about 16 and a ‘cover supervisor’ doesn’t have much ‘legal-rational’ authority), so the only way out was to try and assert some ‘charismatic authority’.

So I threw caution to the wind and decided to be myself. And it worked, for the most part. Students warmed to me and it got to the point where serious bad behaviour in my classes was rare. “Don’t dick about, Mr. Bell’s sound”.

The point here is that I’d earned the respect of the students. It’s a sad world where this has to be the case, but we shouldn’t necessarily blame the students for this: they are routinely subject to domination and automatically distrust anyone in a position of authority which- as I’ve noted- is exactly where they’d see the popular educator. So- if I can use an analogy which runs the risk of alienating all right-thinking people- the popular educator almost has to act like a salesman. Quite rightly, everyone’s default position is to despise the salesman, so they’ve got to use charisma to overcome the initial prejudice they encounter, and then convert this personal goodwill into a belief in the product that’s being sold.

There is no single way to have be charismatic: some people do it through the sheer force of their niceness; others are funny; some are just odd. You have to be yourself, believe in yourself and hope that you have something the students can buy into. And once they’ve bought into you, they might buy into the project. If done self-consciously this is a troubling move, which comes extremely close to exercising power-over without the subjects of that power even realising it (the most worrying kind of power, as Steven Lukes has argued). But it strikes me that it’s legitimate for four reasons:

1. Charisma is inescapable. Even in an anarchist utopia in which all formal hierarchies had been done away with, some people would be charismatic and others would not (though there would be structures to allow those who were less charismatic to influence political organisation).
2. We do not yet live in an anarchist utopia. Whilst anarchism is a prefigurative political philosophy- one which seeks to enact itself through its praxis rather than wait until a radical break- anarchists must also be prepared to be pragmatic and engage tactically with the norms of the contemporary society in order to challenge them. Writing an article for The Guardian on anarchism might be an example of this. Popular education helps make power (of all forms) visible, so the one-time exercising of a power which may go unrecognised is an acceptable trade-off in the long run.
3. Whilst the salesman or the dictator seeks to use their charisma to achieve power-over; the popular educator is using it to achieve power-with (more on this below).
4. Anarchism’s prefiguration is inwardly focussed. That is to say that anarchists deal with each other in the manner that they would in an anarchist society: it is in the social relations between anarchists that the ‘new world in the shell of the old’ is to be found. When engaging outside the anarchist community, however, this does not apply to such an extent. The attitudes of resenting authority in the manner I’ve discussed above would not exist in an anarchist society, because formalised hierarchies would have been done away with.

I think three is the strongest of these points. The educator’s charisma should properly be seen as a form of power-with, as defined by Starhawk. It is ‘the power of a strong individual in a group of equals, the power not to command, but to suggest and be listened to, and see it happen’ (I take this Sparhawk quote from Uri Gordon‘s Anarchy Alive, which I can’t recommend enough for its discussion of power in anarchism).  It is a power that- like Spinoza’s conatus- self-maximises but never dominates, spreading throughout the group so that each individual feels empowered within the collective, and feels that they can change the world for the better.  It might even enable each individual to maximise their own charisma.

Records on Ribs: A Machine of Loving Grace?

(Another cross post with Records on Ribs)

A while back I wrote a lengthy post on hypnaogic pop, cyberpunk and utopia (I noted in the ‘get out clauses’ at the bottom that I’d rather shamefully failed to work Records on Ribs into my discussion, and reading it back now it seems strangely pessimistic- coloured by a more paternal Marxist bent than I would generally subscribe to, powerful though such arguments are). Anyway, I’m reminded of this because Rick Poynor’s post on Adam Curtis’ latest BBC documentary, ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’ (which is named after the poem below- image from Poynor- and which I’ve shamefully not yet seen)  joined up the dots for me between cyberpunk and the prefigurative utopianism of Records on Ribs which I discussed in today’s earlier blog post.

Text of poem is at the bottom of the post.

Of particular note in Poynor’s dissemination of Curtis’ documentary is the idea that the cybernetic dream of utopia- of a ‘cybernetic ecology’ is over. This seems to run contrary to the claims I made in yesterday’s post about seeing Records on Ribs as a prefigurative utopian space, but I think we have to acknowledge that the web- whilst it might provide the model- does not provide all the means. Building a society beyond capitalism will mean far more than sharing stuff online: the basic substances of existence- food, shelter, clothing-  cannot be downloaded, no matter how fast your modem. We cannot pretend that Records on Ribs constitutes an adequate offering to the struggle. It is relatively easy to create communist spaces online; far less so in the physical world.

But we do not believe that we should abandon decentralised, nonhierarchical, self-organising modes of being. Whilst there is a similarity with much neoliberal thought (Hayek’s concept of catallaxy, for example, or even ‘The Big Society’), and whilst neoliberalism has co-opted this rhetoric, the world we live in fails to deliver on the promise of anarchistic cyberneticism because it is a system which is founded upon- and which perpetuates- inequality. Where there is inequality there is also hierarchy and where there is hierarchy there cannot be immanent self-organisation. Money buys access and control, and forms which threaten neoliberalism’s total domination are destroyed or co-opted. Where there is hegemony and police brutality there is not genuine, immanent, self-organisation. The system does everything it can to head off change. It might be internally dynamic (though even this is questionable), but it refuses to go beyond itself.

It’s time to wrestle back nonhierarchy and self-organisation from capitalism and to liberate it in the name of communism; in the name of commonly owned property. It’s not time to retreat from the utopian dream that networks and nonhierarchical organisation promise us.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
by Richard Brautigan

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pins and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

To Free or Not to Free?

Cross post with Records on Ribs (the creative commons label I co-founded and run with Alex)…

The issue of distributing music for free rarely goes away, and it’s all kicked off in Wire magazine following UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith’s Epiphany in last month’s issue in which he stated that as a result of filesharing  ‘just like you I stopped buying music’. This month’s edition contains a strongly worded response by ReR boss Chris Cutler, which argues that the ‘all music should be free’ movement is an ‘idiot wave’. As a record label that gives away its music for free these are issues we’re naturally interested in. We’d like to think we’re not part of an idiot wave, but are aware of the complex ethical position we’re in. Hopefully this post will clarify our position a little more.

A New World in the Shell of the Old

Despite our manifesto claim that we are ‘not against anything’, Records on Ribs exists at least partly to protest capitalist modes of production and the monetary theories of value and the system of copyright that accompany  and support capitalism. But negative critique  contains- at least implicitly- a positive vision of how the world should be otherwise, and for us that positive vision is writ large in everything we do. We see Records on Ribs as a prefigurative utopia: a space of commonly owned property which points to how the world might otherwise be. It is ‘a new world in the shell of the old‘, as Aaron Peters puts it. It is communism, decentralised: here and now.

Pop Will Eat Itself

Kenneth Goldsmith’s file-sharing inspired Epiphany is something quite different. I don’t know much about what his politics are, but the views he expresses are not in any sense anti-capitalist. Rather, they embody the eternally disatisfied greed of capitalism’s dream consumer. ‘The minute I get something’, he writes ‘I just crave more’. This is what capitalism demands of us: each purchase promising something it can’t possibly deliver and setting in chain a feeling of dispondancy and failure, which drives us on to consume more and more, even as we boast about what we do have (‘It’s all about quantity…I’m drowning in my riches. I’ve got more music on my drives than I’ll ever be able to listen to in the next ten lifetimes’). Goldsmith argues that this ‘is an inversion of consumption…in which we’ve come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring’, but there’s not really much inverting going on-for many decades capitalism has been about the thrill of the chase rather than the catch itself. After all, if we’re satisfied with the objects of our consumption we’ll cease to consume. Goldsmith sitting in his study feverishly downloading rarities from across the globe is experiencing the same thrill as Carrie, Samantha and co as they trawl the malls of Dubai for dresses they’ll probably forget they own. t’s an alienating existence marked by addiction to the chase rather than any enjoyment.

What’s interesting about Goldsmith’s column (and I should make it clear that I have no interest in passing judgement on him) is that his views represent the point at which the logics of capitalism overtake themselves. Promised the world, consumers suddenly realise that through the internet they can take it for free, and help themselves to whatever they can. Having for so long been told that greed is good, the subject of consumerism seizes that greed and uses it to bring down the system that helped to create them.

Where’s the free plumbers?

Except it doesn’t really threaten to bring down the system. The immediate result of thousands of people downloading music, films and television is that the people who make it suffer. We couldn’t give a flying fuck about Lily Allen or Warner Brothers or 20th Century Fox, but we do care about our many friends who make brilliant music and struggle to make ends meet from day to day because hardly anyone pays them for their music, whilst capitalism carries on as usual in other spheres.

There are two answers to this. The first is to encourage people to pay for the music they listen to-  by calmly stating the damage that downloading music can do (as Cutler does) and by making the physical object worth spending money on, restoring the fetish for the object which Goldsmith says he has lost. The second is more long-term (although as a prefigurative movement it is also immediatist) and calls for a system of exchange beyond capitalism: gift economies, common ownership and mutual aid (and to be fair to Goldsmith, he touches on these issues here). Free music here works as a prefigurative movement heralding a complete shift in our relations. As Cutler notes, plumbers do not work for free. But capitalism is not the end of history and perhaps one day plumbers will work for free. Perhaps, perhaps by giving away our music for free we can play our part (a tiny part) in showing what can be done when we abandon capitalism’s modes of exchange.

A Cautious Revolution

It’s clear that these two strategies are almost mutually exclusive- and this clash between short term survival and long term radical change is a problem that those trying to go beyond capitalism often encounter. Discussing the plight of workers at car manufacturing plants in Oxford in the 90s, David Harvey noted that the short term aims of securing their jobs hampered many longer-term goals- better working conditions, higher pay and a cleaner local environment. And many sympathetic to the plight of workers would probably also crave a world without so many cars and their destructive impact on our health and our environment, which clearly wouldn’t do their job prospects much good.

There is, then, clearly a tricky balance to strike and in my own musical consumption I try and navigate both paths. On one hand I offer music for free through Records on Ribs, recognising that doing so is not just a way of ‘getting the music out there, man’, but a political act; a utopian act. And I download music for free too. On the other hand I spend as much as I can on music released by labels who care about their artists and support a whole microindustry of professionals and creatives- designers, lathe cutters, etc. These are all skills/trades we’d want to survive beyond the revolution so we must be cautious not to trample them in our greedy haste for a new world. And hey, Records On Ribs isn’t above accepting donations too.

It’s a tricky debate, and I think we should welcome both the honesty of Goldsmith and the clairty of Cutler. But as we think through what it means to acquire music, we should also think how we might be able to live beyond this shitty system that causes so much suffering and unhappiness.

All music should be free, but so should all plumbing.

Art’s Utopian Function

Over the last year or so I’ve become intrigued by the links between utopia(nism) and ‘contemporary art’. I’m clearly not alone in thinking through these links: the excellent Whitechapel Gallery/MIT ‘Documents of Contemporary Arts’ series has published an edition on utopia, and I recently attended a really interesting conference at Arken Museum of Contemporary Art near Copenhagen on the relationship between these two fields (which was organised in support of their three year long Utopia exhibition). Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that more could be done to theorise the relationship between art and utopia(nism); particularly from the side of utopian studies, where- despite the continued influence of Bloch (who saw just about everything as utopian), and the spectre of Adorno on the periphery- most research seems to be focussed around Lyman Tower Sargent’s ‘Three Faces of Utopianism’: literature, intentional communities and political theory, with a heavy bias in favour of the former (although the last edition of Utopian Studies was a special issue on music, and its editor- Nicole Pohl- gave an excellent paper on craftivism and utopianism at the 2010 Utopian Studies Society conference). So this post is a tentative attempt to think through the relationship between contemporary art and utopia which will, I hope, sketch out how the two bodies of thought might resonate, dissonate and modify each other. I’ll give particular attention to some of the themes that emerged at Arken and try to situate my concept of the nomadic utopia within these debates. I should add that my knowledge of art theory is minimal at best, though I’m quite comfortable with this position: someone better read (and I intend to get to this position) might not see things the way an ‘outsider’ might.

Art’s Positive Function: Representing Utopia

The most obvious (crudest?) way in which art and utopia interact is through art offering representations of utopia; creating great celebrations of the life to come. The function of art here is to inspire us to work for what Fredric Jameson calls ‘the utopian program’- a systemic political strategy designed to capture space and shape it in accordance with a utopian design. It might offer a ‘realistic’ vision of the aesthetics of utopia, or simulate the giddy excitement of life in the good place. It is this kind of utopian expression frequently accused of being orientated to perfection (Jameson, for example, says the program aims at totality and closure), and which is criticised for paving the way to dystopia. No-one likes a grand narrative nowadays.

Such art is frequently not autonomous, but is bound up with politics (revolutionary or otherwise), architecture or advertising: it may not even be art at all (but let’s not go down that road). And as Jacob Wamberg reminded us at Arken, it also runs the risk of being kitschy; of having little artistic merit.

Art’s Heuristic Function: Unpicking Dystopia

Yet we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss all artistic representations of utopia (not sure I’d want to salvage Kinkade, mind). Should they really be taken as to be blueprints or representations of perfection? Can they not be read instead as heuristic suggestions that the world could be otherwise: hints at a future whose power lies not in the specificity of their visions but in the fact that they have a vision? Lyman Tower Sargent, Darko Suvin and Tom Moylan and others have made this point about utopian literature (and Ruth Levitas about utopia more broadly), and at Arken Stephen Duncombe made a similar point- arguing that More’s Utopia (and works of utopian art) function as ‘imaginal machines’ (a term taken from Steven Shukaitis) which prevent us from ‘returning safely to our own place’. He offered Rob Walker’s Hypothetical Development Organisation and the fake building site notices of Steve Lambert as exemplars. By proposing to build ‘utopian’ structures in the present, their work unsettles our sense of what is normal and- perhaps- of what is possible.

This ‘unpicking of certainty’ was the impetus behind ‘Towards an Even Geography’- a project I instigated with my good friend Rachel Walls when we worked on the Public Programming team at Nottingham Contemporary for the duration of the Uneven Geographies exhibition last year. We published five utopian visions (most of which were commissioned in response to the exhibition) as a small pamphlet and accompanying poster (which appropriated the aesethetic of Öyvind Fahlström‘s dystopian Column Two- featured in Uneven Geographies- by a class of 9 and 10 year olds at Haydn Primary School).

Such utopian works may not provide all the answers to the world’s ills, but they certainly show us that there’s an alternative to the dystopia we currently live in. ‘To speak of utopia is always to speak of the present intolerable arrangements’, as Kropotkin once said, moving utopia away from a vision of a positive future and towards a critique of a negative present.

Art’s Negative Function: Utopia as Process 

It’s clear, then, that the representation of utopia may not function as a programmatic blueprint, but as the instigator of what Jameson (drawing on Ernst Bloch) calls the utopian impulse: something which acts in the immanent realm rather than calling to us from a transcendent location in the temporal or geographic Great Beyond. For Adorno (who dialogued with Bloch on these issues), this impulse is utopia. Far from being a positive vision of radiance and fulfillment, utopia is inherently negative: a fidgety, eternally dissatisfied force which destroys the conditions of the present. Positive utopian visions are merely for ‘bourgeois comfort’ (Jameson again); utopia never settles on a particular order but destroys all orders. It is this reading of utopia that Boris Groys identifies in Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space from His Apartment, which:

frees the original utopian energy of the cosmic dream from imprisonment in a particular political and technological system. Leaving behind its empty, ideological and technological shell, the cosmic dream re-establishes its own essence and establishes, post factum, its authenticity, because the essence of a dream is the very fact that its essence is not fixed, it has no definite form and it is not institutionalised. For it is only longings, desires and indefinable wishes that can now be genuinely collective…Even the act of emigration, leaving Soviet society behind, is not presented as a betrayal of that society but as something nurtured by the same utopian energies that originally led to the birth of this society…Which is why the desire to cross borders, to overcome constraints, can still be regarded as an expression of that original utopia’

It’s this negative concept of utopia which constituted much of the discussion at Arken. Rachel Weiss spoke about new Cuban art, weaving a complex cat and mouse tale in which artists seek to keep the utopian impulse alive in the face of the utopian program (in the form of the Cuban state). In her opening address Camilla Jalving- a curator at the museum- noted that ‘utopia is what it is by not being’: outopia (no place) rather than eutopia (good place), or ‘The Place that isn’t', as the title of her short essay in the museum’s guide to Olafur Eliasson’s Your Blind Passenger (the current work in the Utopia exhibition) puts it. Meanwhile Richard Noble, who edited the aformentioned Documents of Contemporary Art on Utopia, argued utopia is most political when it’s being negative, and Nils Norman argued that utopia is an analytical tool which enables us to look at a space and critically reveal what is not there.

Noble also quoted Peter Berger’s claim that Adorno sees art as utopian because ‘it cannot be absorbed into the practice of life’. The claim here is that from its position of relative autonomy, art provides a space for critical (negative) reflection on life. Without an autonomous art we will lose a vital space for negative critique and the practice of utopia, leaving neoliberalism free to celebrate itself in all its hideous vainglory.

The influence of Marx and Engels is strong on this variety of thinking. There is, of course, the scathing criticism of positive utopianism as bourgeois- but replace art/utopia with communism you’re not far off the following, from The German Ideology:

Communism for us is not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. 

Now I’m certainly more attracted to this theorisation of utopia than the utopia-as-blueprint model: I’d agree with Wamberg that this is likely to be kitsch and/or totalitarian. But I can’t fully embrace this idea of utopia as a direction, impulse or negative force. I’m against blueprinting perfection, but I don’t think utopia can do away with the notion of space. To do so is to lose the specificity of utopia: it is to confuse it with radical politics, and when we do that there is no need to call it utopia. What Adorno et al. are calling utopia is, in fact utopianism, and utopianism seems pretty redundant without a utopia. The passage from Groys above seems to understand this- calling the impulse which prompted the man to propel himself into space utopian, but not utopia itself (which remains spatially bound).

This seems to leave utopia’s sole function as a heuristic device or imaginal machine unpicking our certainty in the world we currently find ourselves in. But whilst I think this is a really valuable function of utopia, I don’t think it’s all utopia can do- utopia doesn’t have to be about the ‘no place’ which forces us to critically return to our present; it can also be about the prefigurative ‘good place’ which offers an alternative to our present.

Art’s Positive Function #2: Being Utopia

The concept of the nomadic utopia- which I’m developing in my PhD- seeks to retain Adorno’s utopia’s negative, immanent rejection of the present without doing away with the ‘positive’, spatial aspect of utopia. It agrees with Stephen Duncombe, who argued at Arken that criticism is now pretty ineffectual: using art/negative utopia to blast away false consciousness/dystopia is not sufficient; it must create spaces which offer positive alternatives. The nomadic utopia is spatially situated, but it remains a place of becoming; a place-in-process (and yes, I need to read Lefebvre). It remains a utopia only to the extent that it is open to change, and to the extent that that change is open to change. The utopia is constituted by the utopianism which created it and continues to create it. Heraclitus’ river that can’t be stepped in twice or Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘schizophrenic object’ (an object which continues to be defined by the forces of production that brought it into being) might be considered as analogous philosophical concepts.

Taking the immanence of Bloch and Adorno’s thought, nomadic utopianism accepts that any static order of things will be unacceptable; dystopian (a site of fulfillment/closure/totality I call a State Utopia, but that’s for another post). It is, therefore, a negative movement. Yet this negativity does not sit in splendid isolation from society, but transforms society (or a quantity of it) into a utopian space. Thus, the relationship between utopia and utopianism is inverted. Rather than the former calling the latter into being (here is the way to live, now you must create it), the latter creates the former. The utopia is made by the utopianism. It is a prefigurative political action. The positivity implicit in Adorno’s negative critique is made explicit and topos is returned to utopia.

Anarchism’s influence on the concept of the nomadic utopia is strong, as is that of Gilles Deleuze (from whose work with Felix Guattari the concept ‘nomadic’ is taken). In order to remain open to the future a space must be nonhierarchical and constituted by difference-in-itself. It is this which makes it both a good place and a no place: the good coming from Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza and Nietzsche (where it is a self-willing force seeking to maximise its capacity for puissance, or productive power); the no coming from the fact that the nomadic utopia can never announce its victory, can never say ‘this is utopia for all time’, but must say ‘no’ to any attempt to ossify the social relations of the space.

Elsewhere, I have suggested that the spaces created by improvising musicians function as nomadic utopias. But what of art?

There are two questions here. On the first: ‘what art catalyses or empowers a nomadic utopianism?’ I would point to the heuristic utopian programs mentioned above. The utopias they depict might not be nomadic (or we might not have enough information to know), but their function is to help us go beyond the present; to open up the present to the future. The second is harder to answer. E.P. Thompson’s pronouncements on class hold true for the nomadic utopia: we cannot understand it, or represent it, by taking a snapshot of its make-up at a particular point in time. Rather, we must observe it over a period of time. Only then can we assess its nomadism: the extent to which it remains open to the future; remains defined by forces which seek to go beyond it (This is not to say that the nomadic utopia is in a constant state of ecstatic flux. Such a situation would hardly be utopian at all. Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman can, perhaps, be read as a nomadic dystopia. Change may be relatively slow- what mattes is that the space is not closed to change; has not ossified into a form which it regards as fixed, or ceases to consider as a form that could be changed).

Representing nomadic utopia through art may not be possible. It might look like a painting by Hundertwasser; it might spring up in an abandoned tower block. Or its spaces might be invisible, such as the spaces created in the practive of collectively improvising music. But perhaps art can help us create a nomadic utopia? That is to say, can the artwork itself can be a nomadic utopia? Bourriaud’s concept of the relational aesthetic can perhaps be of use here. Of particular interest is his assertion that ‘contemporary art resembles a period of time that has to be experienced, or the opening of a dialogue that never ends’ (though I have to say- much of the art he celebrates leaves me rather cold). Joseph Beuys- an influential figure for Bourriaud- is also interesting here. His short essay ‘I Am Searching for My Field Character’ speaks of:

‘A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.

This most modern art discipline- Social Sculpture/Social Architecture- will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor or architect of the social organism. Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of Fluxus and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can turn inito a politically productive force, coursing through each person and shaping history.’

For Beuys, art no longer occupies a sphere of critique autonomous from society, and this is central for nomadic utopianism. If social relations are to be truly open to difference, then all must be considered as artists: not those deemed artistic by galleries and collectors (a point which rather makes a mockery of art’s supposed autonomy, surely).

Art, then, merges with that society and seeks to transform it- not through some hierarchical, vanguardist resculpting of society, but through everyone being an artist, and repeatedly experiencing (everyone else’s) art.  ’Society as a work of art’, as the title of Malcolm Miles’ Marcuse-inspired paper  at Arken put it, or Jon Dewey’s concept of ‘art as experience’, perhaps. I’ll stick to more familiar ground, however, and draw on the arguments of musicologists Adam Harper and Christopher Small, for whom music should not be seen as some autonomous entity separated out from the lifeworld, but as a part of that lifeworld itself. Here’s Harper, on precisely that point:

You see, there are many languages throughout the world that don’t actually have a word for music. This is usually because a culture has no concept of music as an abstract noun that needs to be signified. These aren’t the languages of societies and civilisations that don’t have any practices we in the West might interpret as musical – such activities are found in varying forms throughout the world’s populations – far from it. For centuries, Westerners have grown up with the idea that music is an abstract thing. This handling of musical activity gives rise to the belief that music is separate from, and floats above, everyday life – at best reflecting it, reminding us of it, rather than residing in the real world and embodying it. (taken from here).

If we replace ‘music’ with ‘art’ here, then you arrive at what Nils Norman spoke of in Copenhagen: an art that constitutes a praxis which runs through all the artist’s activities as a human being. So for Norman- a teacher as well as an artist- teaching becomes an artistic practice, as evidenced by two projects he’s instigated: The Exploding School and The School of Walls and Space; and by his work for the exhibition Utopia and the Everyday in Geneva from 2009-10. Interestingly (for me, at least), the Exploding School and the School of Walls and Space are both influenced by critical pedagogy and anarchist theories of education. I think it’s possible to see the anarchist ‘classroom’/critical pedagogical space as a nomadic utopia (I’ve written on improvised music and critical pedagogy here), and Bourriaud states that Guattari poses ‘the ultimate aesthetic question’ when he asks ‘[h]ow can you bring a classroom to life as though it were an artwork?’.

I was also excited by Norman’s talk of the adventure playground movement (he’s written a book on adventure playgrounds in London) and thought this was- perhaps- a potential realisation of the nomadic utopia: a space made and remade by those who inhabit it without any form of hierarchical ordering (I’m postulating here, I haven’t read enough to know for sure), whilst his cheeky suggestion to create ‘zones of disorder’ in North London (where health and safety and planning laws are foregone; giving the community a space they can utilise as they see fit) reminded me of the Eastside Island Utopia Project I’m establishing in an attempt to collaboratively think through how a nomadic utopia might look in reality.

Heuristics, Positivity and the Future of the Art Museum
(as best I can manage in a couple of hundred words) 

Yet perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Whilst creating and uncovering nomadic utopias (through art or otherwise) offers a much needed positive political vision, it leaves our capitalist dystopia largely intact. The marginality (and relatively apolitical- or ‘amacropolitical’ nature) of many such practices is unlikely to have much effect on this fucked up world because the needs for such ways of living don’t make themselves apparent to many. And so we’re left with the conundrum Marcuse expounded back in 1970, which Malcolm Miles quoted at Arken:

‘[F]or new, revolutionary needs to develop, the mechanisms that reproduce the old needs must be abolished. In order for the mechanisms to be abolished, there must first be a need to abolish them. That is the circle in which we are placed, and I do not know how to get out of it’.

So I think we do still need some art that operates in a sphere of relative autonomy: art galleries/museums are some of the most frequented sites of (potential) opposition to the current order we have, and we shouldn’t treat them as the enemy, structures to be abandoned as art and life dissolve into one another.  If a nomadic utopia managed to flourish on a large scale, I’m not sure what kind of spaces for the display of art would be needed. I’d like to think it would be an integral part of everyday life, but I’m tempted to say that there would still be a need for art galleries: spaces where art did have some kind of autonomous space and where it could continue in critical function. Perhaps what we perhaps need is an ‘Exploding Museum’ to go with Norman’s Exploding School (and on this note, I must get myself a copy of this: Arken’s book on ‘utopic curating’); the art gallery/museum as a space for art, education, life and utopia which critiques its society, but also transforms that society into a work of art. Into a utopia.

Stairway to Heaven: Utopian Musicking in Stockholm

This piece on utopian musicking by Adam Harper at rouges foam is one of the finest things I read last year. It resonates nicely with (and helped me develop) a lot of the arguments I make about the practice of collectively improvising music and nomadic utopianism in my PhD (not to mention in the book I’m currently writing- for the same publisher as Adam, no less).

Anyway, I mention this because I’ve just come across a lovely little video which shows some utopian musicking in a most unlikely location. Isn’t it joyful?

Thanks to my good friend Deirdre for finding this.

(Of course, the fact it’s so joyful makes it even more hateful that it’s been used to sell cars made by a company that’s had some pretty strong claims made against it in recent years (ctrl+f on Volkswagen here is also depressing). In a way I find it less worrying when corporations make adverts promoting worldviews I find abhorrent; when they start appropriating visions of the world I find attractive I get very upset. I find it deceitful and dishonest- as if Volkswagen really care about making the world a more musically utopian place, or adidas really care about making estates look nicer. Of course the people who make visions of the world I find attractive probably need the money far more than, say, Moby- which makes the whole thing even more tragic. But ultimately I think I have to condemn any flirting with advertising for large corporations, despite the undoubted artistic merit of some of these).