nomadic resonance #1: Kafka/Kabakov-Groys’ Lonely Becomings

Franz Kafka- The Departure

I ordered my horse to be brought form the stables. The servant did not understand my orders. So I went to the stables myself, saddled my horse, and mounted. In the distance I heard the sound of a trumpet, and I asked the servant what it meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped and asked: “Where is the master going?”. “I don’t know,” I said, “just out of here, just out of here. Out of here, nothing else, it’s the only way I can reach my goal.” “So you know your goal?” he asked. “Yes,” I replied, “I’ve just told you. Out of here- that’s my goal.”

Ilya Kabakov- The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment

For Boris Groys, Kabakov’s installation ‘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.’

Album Review: Kogumaza

So, I’ve started doing the occasional album review for The Quietus. I’ve written on epic45′s Weathering and Evangelista’s In Animal Tongue so far, and I also wrote on Kogumaza’s self-titled debut album. This wasn’t published though, probably because it came out in May and I didn’t get round to writing about it ’til September. Or because they didn’t like my review. Either way, I thought I’d pop it up here.

The album was released by the consistently excellent Low Point, and can be streamed just here:

In his fabled 1994 essay ‘Post-Rock’, Simon Reynolds argued that the titular movement (or tendency, perhaps) was about ‘using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes, using guitars as facilitators of timbres and textures rather than riffs and powerchords’. It was a label to be applied to an unashamedly forward looking group of bands who drew on the developments of dub and electronic dance music, and who were united not so much by a sound as by an eagerness to embrace new sonic possibilities.

The name stuck but the definition didn’t. For better or for worse, most bands who’ve come to be labelled post-rock augment their music with non-rock instrumentation (or eschew traditional rock instrumentation almost entirely), or rely heavily on riffs; and a term that once seemed pregnant with futurist possibility is now largely shorthand for a conservativism that displays little sonic imagination beyond Stepping On The Distortion Pedal. So I doubt Nottingham’s Kogumaza would thank me for bringing up the term in relation to their debut album, but cast off these colloquial aspersions and this is a record that brings to mind the sense of possibility that accompanied Reynolds’ original use of the term.

Despite their fairly standard rock set up (two guitars and a drum kit), Kogumaza delve beyond generic conventions to sculpt sound quite beautifully, and it’s worth noting that they consider soundman Mark Spivey to be a fourth member of the band, breaking with rockist assumptions about what it means to be a musician. This illuminating interview reveals how- inspired by dub soundsystems- he uses tape delays to modify their live sound, and his contribution is particularly important on record where the greater possibilities of the studio allow all kinds of glorious tinkering. There might only be two guitars and a minimal drum kit on this record but they howl, scorch and throb in the most unholy ways, lulling the listener into an ecstatic stupor. This is helped by the fact that there’s so much sonic space here: you can live inside the sounds rather than submitting to them: this is music as tactile experience (again, the dub influence is telling here).

It’s not just about texture and timbre though. There might be plenty of ‘post-’, but Kogumaza don’t forget the rock either. Indeed, this album calls into question the binary that the opening of Reynolds’ essay erects between the egghead ‘coldness’ of post-rock and the ‘warmness’ of conventional rock (something, to be fair, that Reynolds does himself towards the end of the essay): it’s has a highly sensual, embodied sound- full of kinetic physicality. The tom-centric drumming (no snare, and cymbals are used only for colour) locks into some propulsive grooving and the riffs- with a knowing nod in the direction of post-hardcore cosmonauts Lungfish- are equally strong, providing a solid grounding for numerous sonic lift-offs. Urgency is injected with subtle polyrhythms and gradual shifts in tempo meaning you can sway your body and tap your feet even as the textures sweep you into a parallel dimension.

It seems futile singling out individual tracks for praise or analysis: this is very much an album album, if you get me (it’s only available digitally or on vinyl and the former version comes as two MP3s: one per ‘side’). Tracks blur into one another (this is no bad thing) and the result is a singular, cohesive and persuasive whole. This speaks of a maturity- an ability to know what you’re good at and stick to it, and Kogumaza is perhaps not an album that a young band could make. It never overreaches, and speaks of a wisdom acquired through years of gigging and recording (the band’s collective CV is impressive, with members playing- sometimes together- in a variety of UK DIY luminaries including Reynolds, Wolves! (of Greece), Bob Tilton, Lords, Not in This Town, I Am Spartacus and Felix).

Yet despite this experience this is a refreshingly uncynical work bursting with an enthusiasm for the sounds rock instruments can make. For the listener it’s a record to cherish; a record to play loud; and a record to inhabit. A record to (post-)rock out to all night long.

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.

Surfacing

Over the last year I’ve been making music with my friend Remi Fox-Novak. We’re called Surfacing, and the music speaks of the creaking of what Deleuze would call the ‘virtual’ realm: the rumblings (often fermented by unequal structures of global capitalism) which constantly threaten to catastrophically rupture our everyday existence- be they environmental disasters, riots or revolutions.

We’re not interested in romanticising these ruptures, merely amplifying them. They are beyond good and evil. They erupt- and they have the potential to change the world. They do not create tabula rasa but they do create an urgent need to re-evaluate what we’re doing and why. It seems we frequently respond in the wrong way: more police, more powers, more racial segregation, more hierarchy, more abuse of the poor and disenfranchised. More nuclear power, more drilling in the polar regions, more destruction of the rainforests. The structures that create the eruptions are re-enforced; the cycle begins again. Temporary economic booms or the promise of ‘free and fair elections’ hide the crisis away again until it flowers visibly. But like a rhizome, it is always there- always underground. It will always push through eventually.

This is a track we began writing about a year ago and finally finished (or temporarily abandoned) about a month ago. It’s sung from the point of view of that rhizome: be that an ecological entity (plant-life literally coming back and reclaiming the world) or a human entity (the excluded, the exploited, the disenfranchised, the dominated).

Surfacing- Surfacing (Susanna’s Song)

We must sing for those who blew too early
With ash and wind and water
We will take back what’s always been ours
Your glass your prophets and your hymns
Are no match for us
We will take back what’s always been ours

We will take back what’s always been ours

Nobody knows this is everywhere
Nobody knows this is everywhere
Nobody knows this is everywhere
Nobody knows this is everywhere

Everybody knows this is nowhere

We: the multitude
The rhizome underneath the ground
Our patience wearing thin
Our song rising
We’ll take back what’s always been ours
What’s always
Been ours

From Self-Mutilation to Self-Organisation

A few years ago I worked as a ‘cover supervisor’ in a secondary school in Nottingham (an unqualified and cheap supply teacher, essentially). For the most part, I loved my time in the classroom. But on a small handful of occasions things went wrong. Completely, hideously wrong. Students with whom I enjoyed good rapport would suddenly flip- embarking on a spell of hugely destructive behaviour: bins were thrown, equipment was smashed and- on rare occasions- I and other students were threatened with violence. Despite my reputation as an understanding member of staff and the fact that I never lost my temper (nor threatened sanctions), there was invariably little I could do but ensure the safety of other students and wait for the student in question to calm down.

These students were not subhuman. They were not scum. They were not chavs. They were not pikeys. They were people, like everyone else. Some of them were could be unpleasant, many of them were often very pleasant: just like any sample of secondary school students, in other words.

From my position of power the cause of these outbursts would be nigh on inexpicable. If any immediate trigger was obvious it would invariably be something as minor as a pen running out, a question proving too hard, me asking them to do something/not to do something.

Frustrated, all I knew was that these were horrible situations: scary for all concerned, and sad too. Witnessing such self-destructive behaviour is not easy.

Such actions aren’t just born in the heat of the moment, though. Nor can they be explained away by mechanistic psychology (“that child has ADHD/something wrong in the head”). The popularity of energy drinks at break-time might be a contributing factor (I’m serious here), but ultimately what appeared ‘inexplicable’ to me was often a symptom of a socialised condition of hopelesness, springing from a sub/semi-conscious understanding that there is no future.

Perhaps this is not even self-destruction: there is no longer a sense of self to destruct. Liberal rhetoric about knuckling down and working hard and making something of life is seen as the patronising, implausible bullshit it is; traditional hierarchies that kept people ‘in their place’ have been eroded by capitalism; collective action to change the situation simply isn’t seen as possibility. There is nothing to do but howl helplessly. I often thought that if this was a struggle for recognition it was a struggle for self-recognition; an act of proving to oneself that you are still capable of doing something.

So when I first read Henry Giroux I felt he was clearly right to say that whilst much classroom ‘rebellion’ has no obvious political content, it does have a political origin.

*       *       *       *

It’s pretty obvious why I’m thinking about this tonight. What we are seeing across London is the hopeless howl of a generation with no future. No, these people aren’t ‘protesters’. No, their actions aren’t self-consciously political (on the whole, at least). But these people are not scum. They are not chavs. They are not pikeys. They are humans, like everybody else.

Triggered by yet more police violence (which I’m not discussing here, but is certainly relevant), I would suggest that we are seeing the simultaneous performance of two roles (which intertwine, and are not exhaustive):

1. That of the consumer who is told they can have it all. 

Hence the looting and pillaging of luxury items. People feel a sense of entitlement. They have been promised so much; so much is dangled in front of them and yet remains (through the debt they have to get into to afford it) a form of social control. WELL FUCK THAT, they are saying. WE WILL JUST HAVE IT. “BECAUSE WE ARE WORTH IT”.

(There are almost certainly people looting things they need and can’t afford too).

2. That of the no-future generation.

Like the student smashing a classroom, the rioters and looters have abandoned a future which has abandoned them. When there’s nothing to fight for, there’s nothing to lose. Those whose sense of self has been taken from them are revelling in the freedom that loss brings.

*       *       *       *

On this second point I think Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s essay ‘Civil War’ merits consideration. First published in 1994, its central message is that the term ‘civil war’ is a misnomer which disguises the fact we exist in a continuum of violence. That is to say, violence always exists beneath the radar and it’s only when it erupts through rioting or military/militial conflict that we pay attention. This much should be self-evident to anyone with more than a passing knowledge of neoliberalism’s march to ‘a  free market and a strong state’; or to anyone who’s been paying attention to gun and knife crime in some of Britain’s most alienated, abandoned communities. And, of course, to anyone who’s seen what the Metropolitan police has been getting away with for decades.

Now I do not endorse many of Enzensberger’s arguments- not least his all-too-ready dismissal of structural/economic causes (it’s not clear how much weight he attaches to the second last point quoted below- he certainly doesn’t see it as a foundational cause of violence), but the following extracts will, I think, strike a chord with those who can’t understand why inequality seems to be fostering violence directed inwards at people’s own communities and not outwards at political elites who create/perpetuate inequality.

“Civil war has long since moved into the metropolis. Its mutations are part of everyday life in our cities, not just in Lima and in Johannesburg, in Bombay and in Rio, but in Paris and Berlin, in Detroit and Birmingham, in Milan and Hamburg. The combatants are no longer just terrorists and secret police, Mafiosi and skinheads, drug dealers and death squads, neo-Nazis and cowboy security guards. Even ordinary members of the public are transformed overnight into hooligans, arsonists, rioters and serial killers. And as in the African wars, the combatants are becoming younger by the day.”

“The perpetrators [display an] inability to distinguish between destruction and self-destruction. In today’s civil wars there is no longer any need to legitimize your actions. Violence has freed itself from ideology.”

“The molecular civil wars in our cities are similarly lacking in reason. Gang warfare in the North American ghettos has nothing to do with the historical class struggle. Not even the theory of black versus white provides a satisffactory rationale, for victims of muggings, robberies and murders are blacks more often than not. It wasn’t the homes of the rich that were the target of the riots in Los Angeles; the perpetrators set fire to buildings in their own community, including the oldest surviving bookshop in America, owned by blacks, and the office of the most militant local politician in the neighbourhood. In gang wars everywhere, it is a case of the have-nots shooting at each other.”

“Howls of protest at the loss of jobs are accompanied by pogroms which make it obvious to any thinking capitalist that it would be senseless to invest in a place where people go in fear of their lives. The most idiotic Serbian president knows as well as the most idiotirc Rambo that his vicil war will turn his contry into an economic wasteland. The only conclusion one can draw is that this collective self-mutilation is not simply a side-effect of the conflict, a risk the protagonists are prepared to run, it is what they are actually fighting to achieve.”

“If you imagine a map of the world that shows the geographical distribution of the ‘superflous’ masses- on the one side regions of underdevelopment in their varying degrees and, on the other, zones of underemployment in the metropolitan centres- and compare these with the sites of the many civil wars, you will notice a correlation.”

“In the collective running amok, the concept of ‘future’ disappears. Only the present matters. Consequences do not exist. The instinct for self-preservation, with the restraining influence it brings to bear, is knocked out of action.”

*       *       *       *

The task, then, must be to take the energies released in the riots and offer to them a future.

This does not mean the lie of ‘social mobility’.

This does not mean the false promises of representative democracy.

This does not mean the vanguardist solutions of intellectual elites.

This means a future  coming from within the communities.

It must be the future as possibility, not the future as readymade solution. A future created by communities talking to one another; by people learning together. A future created by communities sharing their knowledges and their experiences. A future shaped by the knowledge that communities are’t just local but exist across networks of solidarity, identity and experience globally- and that we are each in a number of such communities.

What is happening is ugly. But a beauty can be born from this. A beauty which shows communities that they are powerful. More powerful, in fact, than they had ever dreamed.  The repressive arm of the state cannot cope with them. Assigned roles do not have to be reproduced.

This must be the catharsis which enables us to begin again. The fight must no longer be for self-mutilation but for self-organisation.

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.