Inhalt: #10 – Frühjahr 2008
CLARENZ BARLOW
DIE ZEITEN ÄNDERN SICH
EMIL BERNHARDT
WAS HEISST "KUNSTMUSIK"?
JONATHAN OWEN CLARK
ON THE FETISH CHARACTER OF MUSICAL BOUNDARIES
TILMAN KÜNTZEL
ÜBER DIE SUBJEKTIVE WAHRNEHMUNG AUDIOVISUELLER KLANGINSTALLATIONEN
JÖRG MAINKA
KLANGREDE?
STEFAN POHLIT
TENDENZEN DES MATERIALS?
It was, of course, Theodor W. Adorno who first outlined the modalities, in the twentieth century, of the “fetish character” of music. Drawing on the famous analysis of commodities by Karl Marx, Adorno raises the spectre of a globalised “culture industry” that undermines the properly critical functions of music and the arts by a process of depersonalised assimilation. Artworks themselves becomes a species of pure commodity, marketable and exchangeable like the products of labour and industry, and their “social valuation” (“gesellschaftliche Schätzung”), one could say their “must have-ness,” becomes fetishised. Hence the culture industry dissolves the “genuine” commodity character that artworks once possessed when exchange value still presupposed use-value. However, a different modality of fetish (“Fetischismus der Reihe”) appears in regard to the formal means of composition itself, as in Webern’s Piano Variations (Op. 27), where Adorno sees, in the process of its purely relational dodecaphonic construction, a kind of strange irrationality emerging from the mechanisms of rationalisation itself. Such irrationality or fetish comes about, Adorno says, when the self-determined law of the series becomes a privileged source of meaning for the conductor and performers, a “forcing of the technique [itself] to speak.” But can we not also speak today, in our “postmodern” societies, of a new modality of the fetish character; one that, rather than centering its attention on music or musical material itself, shifts the libidinal focus to the (real or imagined) boundaries or interfaces , in, and between, musical social spaces? To see this, let us first turn our attention to the hermeneutics of boundaries or borders, real or virtual, in contemporary European politics. The point is that the concept of “virtually bordered” political space exists in addition to the “real” physical borders between Nation States. Étienne Balibar, in a recent discussion , claims that such virtual borders exist in at least four (contradictory) visions. Firstly, there is the Huntington-like model of a “Clash of Cultures,” the most prevalent of which, of course, is the implicit conceptual boundary within the West between “ US-led freedom and democracy” and “Islamo-Fascism.” Secondly, one has the model of “global networks” in two antagonistic variants, one capitalist, one “revolutionary,” their common point being “the tendency on both sides to view the emerging structure as a virtually delocalised system of communication, amongst capital as well as amongst social movements.” Thirdly, there is a centre-periphery model, which sets up a dichotomy between the “stable” centre states and the more “unstable” peripheral countries (Turkey, the Balkans etc.). Lastly, one sees a vision of Europe as a kind of endless “Borderland,” where, due to increased surveillance, ID cards etc., one is always “at the border” of something or somewhere – a ubiquity of boundary. We can discern a similar situation within the space of the contemporary musical social field. Talk of “boundaries,” “barriers,” “interfaces,” “cutting-edges” is now also ubiquitous. Here too is the “Clash of Cultures,” but this time with a positive connotation: an an African guitarist “jams” with his American Blues counterpart, a Balinese gamelan ensemble “meets” a star of Italian Opera etc. and, of course, this all happens under the supervision of the “global network” of Adorno’s “culture industry,” which seeks to obliterate all boundaries to the movement of capital, monetary or aesthetic. Such “crossover” events also support the logic of the centre-periphery model. A kind of stipulation exists: “Crossover is fine, as long as you are crossing over with us .” And we also see, in the increasing hybridisation of the (“underground”) musical social space, a kind of ubiquitous boundary, one that is supported by exactly the same “virtually delocalised systems of communication” – the Internet, personal websites, social networking pages, message boards etc. – as its capitalist counterpart. One glance at the pages of music magazine The Wire confirms the emergence of this ultra-hybridization: “Would you like up-tempo Outer-limits-JazzFunk-Techno-Rap, or down-tempo Outer-limits-Jazz-Funk-Techno-Rap?“ […]
Excerpt from Clark: On the fetish character of musical boundaries
Read more in the physical issue #10 !