A hostile environment

One of the most frustrating things about the Mark Kennedy case has been the stultifying failure of its media coverage to point out the obvious. That Met officers are being paid to spy on people exercising their democratic right to protest (however shaky that right has looked since November) is bad enough, but the fact that environmentalists are now considered so iniquitous they merit over a million pounds' worth of subterfuge is both disappointing and inconsistent. The government has ignored enough experts to know environmentalists are not reacting disproportionately. Are they starting to believe their own spin - that Copenhagen wasn't a failure? That we have time to fanny about with bills and revisions just to please the CEOs?

Terence Blacker, writing in The Independent on the the 17th of January, got it half right when he suggested that the Met had 'put excitement and self-interest before any genuine interest in law and order.

But not a moment later the piece takes a rather more sinister direction.

It is not difficult to see why this operation would appeal to a man like Kennedy [...] access to eco-babes willing to do their bit for the cause.

Is this man actually suggesting that Mark Kennedy's lovers somehow deserved what they got because, as activists, they had forfeited all fidelity and respect? Or is he suggesting that women only get into activism for the sex?

Blacker continues to dig without grounds:

Several of Kennedy's lovers are said to be 'deeply upset' to discover they had slept with a policeman. Another claims she feels violated. There is serious talk of a civil action against the police. It is absurd – men never lie more than when they are trying to get women into bed – but no sillier than the rest of the case.

To reiterate: men have no respect for women, but that's fine; women don't deserve their respect anyway; environmentalism is a fetish party, not a belief; now let's all skip down to the stock exchange and get a couple of prostitutes for after.

On a more surprising note, the Green Party commits a few fallacies of its own. Jenny Jones writes on the Green Party website that the worst part of all this is that

targeting peaceful protesters means less cash to pay for anti-terrorism, where murder and maiming is the aim, not blockading a power station or sitting in trees.

I'm downright surprised at the Greens buying into the rhetoric of the War on Terror, especially given how significantly the fight against such invisible enemies detracts from the real enemy - the environmental policy that the Green Party is supposed to be addressing, not marginalising. Perhaps the party has to be seen to toe the Parliamentary line these days - but this kind of lip service only serves to dilute something that needs all the support it can get.

Cultural paranoia

I'm reading Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. It's a depressing block of paper that details some of the incredible crimes perpetrated against communities and individuals in the name of economics, such as the actions of CIA-linked totalitarian governments in South America during the later half of the 20th century. In countries such as Chile and Argentina, Klein tells us, the left wing was systematically destroyed through torture and murder - 'shocked' - to allow the economic ideas of US capitalists to be implemented in place of the progressive politics that were developing in those places, and that constituted a 'threat' to the free market.

I won't attempt to summarise the book - it's essential reading in itself, but either way the Wikipedia entry does it better than I could - but it raises what seems to be a particularly crucial question on page 126:

Is neo-liberalism an inherently violent ideology, and is there something about its goals that demands this cycle of brutal political cleansing [...]?

Marx tells us that, for people to profit, there must be theft and inequality. As Klein points out, theft is usually violent - and, even where there is no physical violence, there is violation (of safety, of ownership, of trust, etc.). So does capitalism, the pursuit of stolen labour, itself necessitate violence and suffering?

To turn it into a thought experiment - could a community, of any size, operate a capitalist system without any of its members being subjected to violence, or being unhappy - say, not being able to afford adequate food, housing, clothing, education, healthcare, and so on?

If not, and I'm undecided about this, then I feel a lot of guilt.

Guilt, partly because I partake in a capitalist society, but primarily because I enjoy it - I earn and spend money, I compete with other people for jobs, I shop around, and I enjoy the things I buy - at every stage, I'm supporting the system that violates people and communities for profit. It's not just about buying ethical products - by buying any products, I'm supporting the system that puts those ethical products within a capitalist market.

This is, supposedly, how the proletariat is kept under control: the elite allows it to have the X-Factor and some new shoes, under the agreement that it won't make too much of a fuss about politics. Am I being pacified by shiny things - in this case, books, records, an MA?

This raises worrying questions about my core beliefs and values. If my values are capitalist - I like ownership and collection, say - then under a system that didn't exploit people I would have to redefine what 'I' meant. I could no longer think of myself in terms of competition and inequality.

So should the first step be to purge myself, or can I work toward the rejection of capitalism without burning all my possessions? There's no reason that books and records can't be socialist, but I don't think I can own them.

But I know that I would rather people no longer lived in horrible poverty than that I had any of my books and records. And yet I sit here right now listening to The Notwist and typing about a book I bought (well, technically, borrowed).

Have other people struggled with this? What have they come up with?

More of what you want

I discovered this dedication on the generic CBS inner sleeve of Leonard Cohen's 1967 debut today. It's an endorsement of the then 19-year-old LP format. What struck me was how, far from trumpeting the attributes that we associate with vinyl records nowadays - those esoteric, affectionately awkward qualities that supposedly make them more rewarding - the liner notes could pretty much have been written about iTunes.

Here's how records give you more of what you want

1. They're your best entertainment buy.

Records give you top quality for less money than any other recorded form. Every album is a show in itself. And once you've paid the price of admission, you can hear it over and over again.

2. They allow selectivity of songs and tracks.

With records it's easy to pick out the songs you want to play, or to play again a particular song or side. All you have to do is lift the pick-up arm and place it where you want it. You can't do this with anything but a long-playing record.

3. They're convenient and easy to handle.

With the long-playing record you get what you want to hear, when you want to hear it. Everybody's familiar with records, too. And you can go anywhere with them because they're light and don't take up space.

4. They're attractive, informative and easy to store.

Record albums are never out of place. Because of the aesthetic appeal of the jacket design, they're beautifully at home in any living room or library. They've also got important information on the backs - about the artists, about the performances or about the programme. And because they're flat and not bulky, you can store hundreds in a minimum of space and still see every title.

5. They'll give you hours of continuous and uninterrupted listening pleasure.

Just stack them up on your automatic changer and relax.

6. They're the proven medium.

Long-playing records look the same now as when they were introduced in 1948, but there's a world of difference. Countless refinements and developments have been made to perfect the long-playing record's technical excellence and ensure the best in sound reproduction and quality.

7. If it's available in recorded form, you know it'll be available on records.

Everything's on long-playing records these days... your favourite artists, shows, comedy, movie sound tracks, concerts, drama, documented history, educational material... you name it. This is not so with any other kind of recording.

8. They make a great gift because everybody you know loves music. And everyone owns a record player because it's the musical instrument everyone knows how to play. Records are gifts that say a lot to the person you're giving them to. And they keep on remembering.

AND REMEMBER... IT ALWAYS HAPPENS FIRST ON RECORDS.

Perhaps there are a few curiosities - points 1 and 7 (and the post-script) are particularly obscure - but I'm intrigued by the ways in which the same market forces have been manipulated and reproduced to justify more or less every U-turn in recorded music for 50 years.

Formalisms 2

The passage below is taken from an essay originally submitted as part of my undergraduate degree in December 2008.

A significant divide between indeterminacy and high Modernism occurs at their respective treatments of form. Referencing Cage’s discussion of the use of indeterminacy in the composition of Imaginary Landscape No. 4 and Music of Changes, Bernstein suggests that the rejection of ‘intentional relationships between sounds’[1] – that is, the rejection of the ‘assumption that a musical work should be a unified whole’[2], i.e. the rejection of musical form as it conventionally functions – is a consequence of embracing indeterminacy. Musical material, be it a set of pitches chosen at random or whatever happens to be going on in the concert hall, can only remain unmediated by the compositional process if it is ‘free of the literature and “traditions” of art’. [3] Form is mediation: even where the form is not classical, but dictated by the ‘inherent tendency’[4] of the musical material, it is in the compositional mediation that takes place after the pre-composition – in the musical ideas’ dictation of form – that music actually becomes music (as opposed to mathematics) for Adorno’s Modernism. A similar reading can be made of Bernstein’s identification of the importance of ‘“totalizing” organicism’[5] to high Modernism. It is for this reason significant that Bernstein focuses on the importance of Cage’s pre-compositional sketches.

Thus, in works whose realisation incorporates an element of indeterminacy, it might be considered that a lack of form as mediation between the raw compositional elements and the listener does not adequately treat subjectivity to qualify as Modernist music. However, this may be too quick a dismissal: if Bernstein’s high Modernism seeks a totalisation of the material’s organicism, and Adorno similarly expects musical material to ‘inherently tend’ towards its own form, then it might be considered that, in the following way, this version of indeterminacy contravenes no Modernist requirements whatsoever. Indeterminacy in realisation is at no point explicitly precluded from being identified as a musical ‘form’ (that is, a mediation) that meets this ‘inherent tendency’ or ‘“totalizing” organicism’ criterion: if Adorno’s Modernism wants form dictated by content, and if we presuppose that content is (firstly) distinct from form and (secondly) capable of dictating its own realisation, then there might be raw compositional elements (such as the content of 4’33”) whose inherent tendency is to be realised, or formed, in precisely this indeterminate way. Although Adorno anticipates that a composer must be the medium through which the material is organised, indeterminate music of this type requires just this: however much we want to let sounds ‘be themselves’, in order to let them be music (or, in fact, to abstract their ‘being’ anything) we need someone to identify them as such (even if this is only the listener, and the line between composer and listener is thus blurred in a manner reminiscent of DeLio’s analysis of Durations III). This applies in equal measure to music in which indeterminacy is incorporated at the compositional, rather than the performance, stage: allowing random or extra-musical processes to ‘compose’ the material still requires the presence of a composer to calibrate and notate the processes, and, more centrally, to identify as composition what is occurring. (Music that in this way confronts the listener with his or her own necessity in the identification of a piece of art can be related to M. J. Grant’s point about the influence of quantum physics on thought on subjectivity,[6] although perhaps the only ‘Modernist’ element in this is that an observing subject is abstracted from observation.)

---

[1] David W. Bernstein, ‘Cage and High Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to
John Cage, ed. by David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 186-213, p. 212.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Cage, Silence (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 59, quoted in Bernstein, p. 212.

[4] Adorno, trans. by Anne Mitchell and Wesley Bloomster, Philosophy of Modern Music (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973), p. 32. (The edition cited elsewhere removes the word ‘inherent’ from the translation.)

[5] Bernstein, p. 212.

[6] M. J. Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 22-27.

Formalisms 1

I was recently asked why I could not get into sport.

For me, sport as a social art form presents a structural[ist] impasse: I can't get the hang of the relationship between its form and its content. As form alone, I would be perfectly happy with the politics and emotion that surround it - but I wouldn't be able to get passionate about what actually happened on a pitch just because it related to those politics. It would have to offer me something distinct to qualify them. If the sports players were not sports players but recorded music, I might be able to understand.

The week that Yes came out, I was reading Music Week twice daily. I still have all the web 'cuttings' about the midweeks, still know the different albums that were threatening it, still remember the daily sales figures. And I was totally, inarticulably devastated when Yes was not only beaten to number one but robbed of the number two spot its sales had earned.

But the competition for chart placing is just that: a competition. And my anguish didn't stem from the competition itself - which it strikes me is the meat of a sports match. What you watch is the competing sales figures. The press cuttings are running around in front of you. The goalkeeper is Ronan Keating's Songs for My Mother LP.

No, my anguish stemmed from what Yes was in relation to the Pet Shop Boys, who the Pet Shop Boys are in relation to the charts, what the charts are in relation to the media, and so on. For me, the competition was the form, not the content.

The joy experienced when your team is top of the league is, of course, related to what your team means to you outside of the league. But the majority of this meaning - the matches themselves - is analogous to the competition for chart placing I've just distinguished from album. It's like content built out of a vast web consisting only of form.

But to stop the chain here would be indefensibly selective. I'm unhappy with any analysis of cultural perception that doesn't take as its guiding principle a vast complex of unstable relativities without any objectives to relate to. The way I perceive cultural history, at least, is a bit like a Möbius strip, or a circuit that lacks any beginning or end. It's very definitely non-narrative. Much like the consumption of sports seems to constantly reference itself with no 'earth' wire, so too the notions of 'what Yes was in relation to the Pet Shop Boys, who the Pet Shop Boys are in relation to the charts, what the charts are in relation to the media, and so on' are only really borrowed from other arbitrary constructs like 'music' and 'identity', which trail back into the horizon without any full stops.

Perhaps, then, the theoretical separation of form and content only really comes into useful fruition - somewhat ironically - when the two swallow each other. It is then that the assumed passive object - sport, or Yes - becomes an active exercise. To perceive a form is to perform it. Once the active nature of the distinction is embraced, then we are embracing interplay, and our own role as creator and created in relation to the object being analysed. And interplay is fun.

http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/issue/view/1

My first published academic work opens the first issue of this new journal. http://www.dancecult.net/ as a resource goes wider than the journal itself, including, chiefly, a comprehensive and expanding bibliography, and plenty of linked articles. It has been proving rather difficult to find people with similar research interests, especially since the Institute for Popular Culture collapsed because no one was using it, but Dancecult seems to house a veritable zoo of them - even if the journal's editorial namechecks Simon Reynolds in rather too positive a context.

The move to Manchester finally makes a sort of sense. That is, it made perfect sense before it happened, but there has been a pervading concern since that date that leaving university was a horrible mistake and that I should have walked straight into a postgrad. It didn't help that my job was reasonably worthwhile but vacuously under-stimulating.

My job is still both of these things, but familiarity seems to have loaded a bit of perspective into my situation. As such, I have decided to make the most of my stint outside the academy and do some writing.

I already have a paper journal, which is updated on a daily basis with ritualistic fervour. I also have a livejournal, whose relationship to this blog is currently somewhat ambiguous, but whose last real entry is over a year old and whose content is perhaps more documentary than I intend this to be.

This uncharacteristically adult behaviour is difficult to conclusively blame upon anyone. The acquisition of a diegetic soundtrack, via David's old CD Walkman, has ordered a lot of the time I spend in my own head while walking and on trains. Some of the resultant marriages - recorded sound to four other real-time senses - have been

• cinematic (melancholic electro-pop whilst walking home through the rain after an hour spent reading Ulysses in the Cornerhouse)
• ridiculous (most notably, struggling 1.1 miles down Portland Street with about 40 empty wine bottles to the Travis singles collection)
• awkwardly moving (I will not be listening to '1000 Oceans' by Tori Amos on the way to work again).

To some extent, a lot of the content of this blog will have been shaped through such marriages. I switch off slightly during work, so there is usually an intellectual backlog when it's time to put my headphones on again.

Last night, before it was time to go out, it was dark, cold, and raining. Embedding The Radio Dept. into this particular type of Sunday evening convinced my emotional nerve centre that it was October 2005, and I remembered that I usually feel quite romantic during the autumn, often intransitively. The autumn has traditionally been when things have changed (clothes) or started (school years, personal relationships). Such recollection has perhaps been one catalyst for this eventual embrace of graduate life: I have never been uprooted during the summer before, so it is hardly surprising that I wasn't seasonally equipped for it.

But now it's the last day of summer, at least by the farming calendar, and I am ready to feel things and listen to a lot of music. Like Green Day in reverse, it will be September when I wake up.(1)

(1) I wish my life came with footnotes.