Capital Neighbors

Ben and I have fired up a little discussion of capitalism and art on the ICELU web forum. Here are few thoughts from that discussion:

I'm very fond of Ben's sober attitude regarding art-as-commodity, or art-as-action maybe. He's not interested in formalist beauty, in abstraction-for-purification, or expression in the romantic, emotional sense. "So mentally I try to strip the music of this beauty to reveal it as what it is: a product, a CD, a gift (this is what I try to create), a political agitator, a ritual. That's how I listen."

On the forum, I paired this approach with something that I took from reading Hardt & Negri's Empire - which is that the only way for the people (by which I mean "hackers" in the information-producers sense of the term that McKenzie Wark uses in his book The Hacker Manifesto) to avoid a kind of slavery in the grip of capitalist powers is to understand, embrace, and soberly wield the methods of capitalism: that is, all the lovely postmodern trappings of the information age. Rather than reject the methods of capitalism (commodification, informationalisation, etc) simply because they are used to cripple and marginalize - it should be the artist's goal to command these techniques and use them to dissolve the fantasy of a fascist super-community that one either belongs to or is rejected from outright (refuse to participate in the discourse of populist media? - you're now irrelevant, marginal, and dangerous). I put it like this on the forum:

Aesthetic homogeny is a tool (and really a fantasy) for the power behind the commodification of art - the myth of a "universal appeal" I think both grabs the wheel of art in capitalism to steer things away from the individual, and also dissolves the idea of community in favor of a kind of fascist super-community that you're either a part of, or nothing. So aesthetic naval-gazing is just the sort of spice to sprinkle onto the rhizomatic/postmodern community prototype - one that embraces the structures of power we have today, but turns them like a knife to cut apart that fantasy super-community.

It's the idea of the rhizomatic, postmodern, decentralized community prototype that gets me the most excited. I can see it everywhere, bubbling under the surface, and more often forcing change, dismantling the super-community brick by brick.

As Ben sees the rhizome:

I think when I talk about "industrialism" I think I try to listen with industrial ears - what complete listening is to me is hearing everything that made a particular piece of music possible. A very incomplete list for say a Sunday afternoon band concert would be: the construction worker who worked on the hall, the Fedex truck that delivered the music (and the factory workers who built the Fedex truck), the legislation in the House of Commons that lead to the formation of the colonialist military organization that originally commissioned a march for the recent acquisition of Bangladesh to the British empire - subsequent from which the composer of the second piece stole the second horn part for his trio section, the man who worked in a motorcycle who eventually begot the tuba player's grandpa, ETC. ETC. ETC.