Aram Sinnreich

Fourth Essay: Art, Communication and Aesthetic Theory

here's the final draft of my fourth and final essay. this was really tough -- the question is lifted more or less verbatim from a rambling email i sent larry a few weeks ago. by using it in this context, he was essentially asking me to put my money where my mouth was. it's hardly great work, but i think i did a pretty good job for two days' work...

 Adorno and Thomas Frank worry about the commercial increasingly impinging on the space of the public sphere. The music industry increasingly worries about their commercial music being treated as a public good (p2p, etc). Maybe a bigger framework would suggest not that either is impinging on the other, but that the categories are becoming less relevant. After all, commerce is simply a specialized form of social interaction. If we believe Bourdieu that there are other forms of capital (social, cultural), then we can understand new communication media and the resulting social practices as forming the foundation for a society in which every kind of capital is transacted like commodities -- or vice versa, where commodities are undifferentiated from other forms of social relations. How would such a development, or way of thinking, relate to traditional ways of thinking about the arts [traditional at least in the West since the 18^th century or so]? Discuss.

 There is an old television commercial for Reese’s Peanut Butter cups that has reached such a level of cultural notoriety (at least among people in my age cohort) that it has become something of an archetype, a kind of shorthand for an entire cultural process. It goes something like this: Two upper crusty types are at the opera, sharing a booth. One of them is eating a candy bar, and the other is (improbably) holding an open jar of peanut butter. Somehow, they collide, and the candy bar lands in the peanut butter, much to the dismay of both men.

 “Hey!” one of the men shouts, visibly enraged. “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!”

 “You got your peanut butter on my chocolate!” the other ripostes with venom.

 At this point, the two return to eating, and discover to their mutual delight that the peanut butter-chocolate combination is infinitely more appetizing than either ingredient was on its own. Peanut butter and chocolate are “two great tastes that taste great together,” the voice-over tells us as we watch the former rival combatants enjoying the fruits of their combined resources with an air of zealous bonhomie.

 I relate this episode not just to pad my page count, but also to introduce a metaphor that may be useful in considering the situation under examination in this essay. Two rival positions have been staked out, each bitterly proclaiming the sanctity of its resources. On the peanut butter side, cultural purists of one stripe or another complain about the encroachment of commercialism into the worlds of discourse and aesthetics. On the chocolate side, commercial interests – especially the entertainment industry – are concerned that peer-to-peer file sharing and other forms of “infringement” increasingly threaten to turn their “intellectual property” into an unrestricted, unremunerative public resource. Perhaps, as the candy bar commercial would suggest, the collision between these seemingly irreconcilable factions represents an inevitable and desirable form of cultural alchemy that will ultimately produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

 Commercialism has been cast as the villain in so many critiques of industrial and post-industrial society that it has practically become a given. Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) are among earliest and most vocal in this camp, arguing that the “absolute power of capitalism” (p. 120) has warped modern Western culture through a process of mass production that standardizes aesthetic practices and products and transforms the body politic into a brainwashed mass of infantilized consumers. In the course of this process, they argue, the pure artistic expression of “truth” has been replaced with popular culture’s logic of “style,” which exists only to manufacture and channel demand among the “deceived masses” (p. 133) for the latest commercial products.

 Although cultural studies theorists have developed their models beyond Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1972) “Frankfurt School,” the threat of commercialism continues to loom large in much of the literature. Barthes (1977), whose analytical framework departs in many important respects from Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s (a comparison I explore more thoroughly in my essay on musicology), shares their apprehension at the cultural power of the marketplace. He laments that “the ‘truth’ of language” (p. 184) is being expunged by the proliferation of soulless, institutionalized forms of expression. This process, he argues, takes place through a commercial mechanism, which he calls “censorship by repletion” (p. 185), in which the market is flooded with so much of the bad stuff that the good stuff can’t survive.

 Habermas (1962), another foundational social theorist who departs radically in many ways from Adorno and Horkheimer (1972), nonetheless shares their wariness of the cultural influence of commercial forces. Habermas’ vision of society is characterized by the “public sphere,” an institution in which private individuals join together as a public to discuss, debate and strategize about matters of collective import – primarily subjects of a political or economic nature. This public scrutiny of the state operates as an analog and a countermeasure to the government’s official legislative functions; no representative democracy can function without one.

 Habermas (1962) acknowledges that capitalism played a vital role in the rise of the public sphere – offering individuals an opportunity to transact and exercise power independently of the state power apparatus. If the public sphere is founded on a modernist notion of individual rights and free control of productive property, these ideas in turn owe their existence to the rise of the bourgeoisie and to the emergence of the capitalist ethos. Yet Habermas also associates commercialism with the degradation of the public sphere. The rise of consumerism, he argues, has spurred a general loss of interest in political discourse and transformed the public sphere from an arena of debate into an arena of marketing and advertising. Thus, like Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) and Barthes (1977), Habermas laments that “truth” has taken a backseat to the cultural dictates of the marketplace.

 More recent scholars have echoed these concerns. Paddison (1982), in his critique of the Frankfurt School, takes issue with Adorno’s (2002) conflation of “serious music” with honesty and “popular music” with corruption. Yet he concedes that “increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of marketing and distribution make it ever more difficult for any music – whether serious or popular, traditional or avant-garde, Western or non-Western – to resist its fate as a commodity” (p. 217).

Wicke (1982) sums up the concerns of many social critics and scholars (cf. Peterson and Berger, 1975; 1996) when he voices concern that this commodification of music will lead to aesthetic homogeneity. “As a form of social practice,” he argues:

music always bears the stamp of the social nature and the concrete organisational structure of the relationships through which it is produced, distributed and assimilated. If these relationships carry the stigma of exchange-value characteristics, then this carries with it a growing tendency towards homogenisation on the part of the perceptual, concrete aesthetic character of the musical sound-shape. (p. 225)

In a similar, if more extreme, vein Lasn (1999) equates consumerism with a religious cult, and complains that “culture isn’t created from the bottom up by the people anymore – it’s fed to us top-down by corporations” (p. 189).

  Frank (1997a; b; c) offers an analysis that is a bit more sophisticated than Lasn’s (1999), but eventually arrives at similar conclusions. He acknowledges that commercial messages have increasingly impinged on the public sphere, and that commercial aesthetics have become increasingly culturally dominant. Yet he suggests that “what’s happened is not co-optation or appropriation, but a simple and direct confluence of interest” (1997b, p. 44) between corporate interests and counterculture. Frank demonstrates this point by examining the ways in which the 1960s counterculture aesthetic helped to reorganize the operating principles of the advertising industry, yet was itself largely a product of that industry. He calls this legacy of institutionalized counterculture “a commercial template for our times” (1997c, p. 235). However, Frank does not equate this “confluence of interest” between advertisers and the counterculture with “public interest” in any generally accepted sense of the term. To the contrary, he argues that a “basic concern” facing contemporary society is “the power of each person to make his own life without the droning dictation of business interests” (1997a, p. 158).

 I could append a nearly infinite number of additional examples, but at some point the law of diminishing returns would set in (if it hasn’t already). The point is clear: there is a prominent and enduring trend of anti-commercial rhetoric in social theory from the early part of the 20^th century to the present day. Despite diverse and often conflicting philosophies, these theorists remain remarkably consistent on one point: culture (aesthetic expression, the public sphere) is a space of Truth and Honesty, and commercial interests have sullied it (warped it, transformed it, appropriated it) with Falsehoods for the purpose of making money. In other words, the cultural peanut butter is tainted with the flavor of commercial chocolate.

 Miles away (in terms of scholarly geography) are arrayed a group of commercial interests making set of arguments about “intellectual property” that, at first glance, would seem to be largely unrelated to the arguments of the social theorists discussed above. As Vaidhyanathan (2001) relates, intellectual property is a fairly recent invention. The category is an amalgam of disparate legal ideas such as copyright, trademark, and patent – ideas originating with the Enlightenment-era notion that financial compensation is an effective incentive encouraging people to share their ideas with one another in a free society. As Vaidhyanathan and Lessig (2004) discuss extensively, the scope of these legal categories has expanded gradually over the years – at the behest of corporate lobbyists – to equate the fruits of intellectual labor with material property.

 As a result of this gradual enclosure of thought and expression, Lessig (2004) argues, a greater portion of what we typically call “culture” is now owned and controlled by commercial interests than at any point in the history of humankind. While Lessig and Vaidhyanathan (2001) are inclined to view this as a negative development with dire consequences for the future of public (and even private) expression, there is another point of view that strong intellectual property laws are necessary in this day and age.

 Proponents of expanding intellectual property controls – many (but not all) of them representatives of corporate interests – argue that the major organs of public culture, such as television, movies, the news media and the commercial music industry, could never exist without the legal ownership of ideas. The argument runs something like this: as the tools of expression increase in complexity (e.g. from pen and paper to cameras and broadcasting towers), so does the cost to operate them. This, in turn, requires an increase in the revenues associated with such expression, and thus entails an increase in the associated financial risk as well. Movie studios, record labels, and other such organizations exist in order to organize the capital and take on the financial risk associated with creative expression in the industrial age because creative individuals, for the most part, cannot. And even these organizations would never make the initial investment it takes to catalyze the process if they didn’t have some form of assurance that revenues would eventually be forthcoming. Intellectual property – the legal right to prevent people from accessing such ideas and expressions without permission in exchange for payment – is exactly the assurance they seek.

 The above description is obviously a major oversimplification, and the details of the argument change depending on which individuals, organizations or species of creative expression are involved. Yet the basic premise – intellectual property as a form of protection for free expression – remains consistent. Clearly, this argument relies heavily on the original logic behind patent, trademark and copyright – namely, that creative expression can be motivated through financial means. However, in practice, the exercise of intellectual property law often seems more like corporate protection from consumers. I will briefly cite two examples to demonstrate my point: legal action against trademark violation and legal action against peer-to-peer file sharing.

 As Bollier (2005) convincingly argues, trademarked language and symbols like the names of companies, products, and celebrities have become part of our cultural lingua franca in the media age. It would be difficult to pass a full day in the company of one’s friends and family without uttering the name of some trademarked entity – whether the title of a movie, the name of a store, or even a brand of food or clothing. “Taken as a whole,” Bollier writes, “such symbols comprise a cultural currency; they help us communicate in succinct, widely understood ways” (p. 82). Consequently, he argues, when trademark law is used to exert complete control over the use of these terms in public discourse, the net effect is the “absolute control over the flow of symbols in our society” (p. 82).

 Bollier (2005) catalogs several recent instances in which trademark law has been used in exactly this way. In 1997, Mattel sued the band Aqua and their record label after they released a song called “Barbie Girl” riffing ironically on the Barbie doll’s girlish image and womanly proportions. In this suit, unlike many other similar ones waged by the company, the defendant prevailed. In 1991, the film studio MGM-Pathé successfully sued to prevent a neighborhood patrol group on the lookout for gay-bashers in New York’s West Village from calling itself the Pink Panthers. To this day, McDonald’s routinely threatens legal action against people and organizations using its trademarked phrases, which include such common and/or innocuous phrases as “Immunize for Healthy Lives,” “Fun Always,” and “Hey, It Could Happen.” In each of these cases, the trademark owner has sought legal recourse to protect unauthorized individuals from using their legally protected language in an unsanctioned context.

 Parallel arguments have been made by media and entertainment companies seeking to exercise copyright control over the distribution of files online via peer-to-peer file sharing services, which allow millions of people simultaneously to exchange digitized files like songs, movies, or pictures.

These services unquestionably represent a challenge to the traditional ways in which the entertainment industry does business. When recorded media was “stuck” to physical objects like CDs and cassette tapes, it possessed two qualities that economists refer to as rivalry (meaning only one person or group can use a resource at a time) and excludability (meaning that a person or group can be prevented from accessing a resource). According to standard economic theory, resources that are both rival and excludable fall under the category of “private goods,” best treated as property and exploited through the market system. However, as soon as music became decoupled from its physical delivery mechanisms, it ceased to be either rival or excludable, recategorizing it as a “public good.” Public goods are notoriously difficult to profit from via traditional market practices; rather, they tend to be managed by governmental or non-profit entities (Johnson, 2000).

Rather than reacting to this challenge by changing the nature of its goods so they would once again be rival and excludible (e.g. by offering songs or movies within the context of an integrated service with various software-driven bells and whistles or agreeing on an industry-wide standard for secure high-definition discs), the entertainment industry’s first response was to use copyright law in a fruitless attempt to curtail online file sharing. In addition to suing the manufacturers and proprietors of peer-to-peer software, this also meant suing their own consumers. By the end of 2004, nearly 7,000 music fans had been targeted by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in file-sharing lawsuits, and nearly all of them had been forced to pay thousands of dollars in settlement fees (McGuire, 2004).

In short, organizations that use intellectual property to profit from the control of creative expression have been simultaneously working to expand the scope of intellectual property protections and pursuing legal means to prevent individuals from recirculating their brands, phrases and creative works freely in the public arena. In an age of increasing technological mediation and increasingly decentralized information distribution, these organizations would argue, draconian legal action has emerged as the only viable means to prevent the public from stealing their property and redistributing it publicly. To invoke my guiding metaphor yet again, these companies are concerned about their intellectual chocolate being swallowed whole in the public peanut butter.

Thus, to recap: on the one side, we have cultural watchdogs bemoaning the commercialization of public discourse. On the other, we have industry watchdogs bemoaning the cultural appropriation of private intellectual property. Perhaps these two trends are related – are, in fact, simply flip sides of a larger trend. Perhaps the dividing lines between cultural and commercial exchange are eroding, and a new paradigm – a social discursive peanut butter cup – is emerging to take their places.

Many of today’s broadest social thinkers certainly suggest that this may be the case. Giddens (1990), for example, argues that “today, ‘money proper’ is independent of the means whereby it is represented, taking the form of pure information” (p. 25). Similarly, Castells (2000) speaks of the emerging global communications network as engendering a “space of flows” (p. 408) in which information, capital, technology, organizations, and symbols swirl among the nodes and hubs represented by individuals, institutions and places. Bell (1999) speaks of the shift from financial to human capital as one of the definitive aspects of post-industrial society. In his model, knowledge has replaced labor as the cornerstone of the global economy – in other words, industry is now constituted by the act of sharing ideas.

Cultural theorists suggest a move in this direction as well. Bourdieu (1984) considers money to be only one form of capital, alongside “cultural capital,” “educational capital” and “social capital.” Each of these is transacted in different ways, he argues, and each plays a vital role in establishing an individual’s social rank and power. The idea of cultural capital has gained widespread acceptance throughout cultural studies literature, appearing without needing to be defined in the work of authors such as Hall (1996), Frith (1996), Gendron (2002), Bernard-Donals (1994), and Thornton (1996). Bollier (2005) makes the culture-commerce connection even more explicit; above, I quoted him referring to corporate trademarks a form of “cultural currency” (p. 82). Similarly, the idea of social capital has been taken up by sociologists and network theorists (Monge & Contractor, 2003), who have in recent years begun to devise ways of measuring social capital based on the structure of an individual’s relationships with others in a social network.

 Thus, it could be argued that these scholars are converging, each from his or her own theoretical and methodological perspective, on a single point: In a networked, post-industrial age, commerce has ceased to represent a unique form of information exchange. Every aspect of human communication, from simple conversations to creative expression to the exchange of goods and services, has become intermeshed in a web of interdependency, creating a common meta-language of networked exchange. This meta-language retains some aspects of commerce (e.g. quantifiability) and some aspects of cultural expression (e.g. identity-construction). For the sake of brevity (and to exercise the prerogative of coinage that secretly motivates every social theorist), I will call this meta-language the “lingua textura,” meaning the “language of the web.”

 Clearly, the emergence of the lingua textura has implications for every aspect of human society, beyond simply the collision of culture and commerce. It has profound consequences, for example, in the realm of aesthetic theory, which has since Kant’s time been dominated by the definition of art as inherently non-functional symbolic expression. As Gross (1995) relates, the Western artistic tradition has for the past three centuries been dominated by the notion that art is necessarily innovative and unique, and is the product of a creative individual endowed with the quality of artistic genius. This paradigm, which defines art in terms of its irrelevance to daily life, has the effect of banishing arts and artists to a cultural “reservation” (p. 3), a form of limbo that, like religion and its practitioners, is viewed by the quotidian world with a combination of reverence and contempt.

 This separation of art and life, Gross (1995) argues, has been enforced and reflected in pedagogical and other institutional traditions. Our culture, Gross and Blacking (1974) argue, doesn’t nourish aesthetic symbolic competency the way it does linguistic competency. Our innate musical talents, for example, are not developed in any meaningful way through institutionalized cultural practices, the way speech and even literacy are. Similarly, I would add that, by banishing art to the realm of the non-functional, it is distinguished from and compared poorly to the commercial sphere, which is commonly seen as “the real world,” and emphasized accordingly in the education of our young.

 However, this Romantic “art-for-art’s-sake” model of aesthetic production doesn’t stand any more of a chance of surviving in the age of the lingua textura than do the notion of culture and commerce as separate and inviolable spheres of human intercourse. If there is no clear dividing line between aesthetic, political and commercial symbolic lexicons, grammars, and sites of interaction, then there can be no clear dividing line between species of communicants, or between the messages they send.

 This erosion of boundaries is clearly at work in the so-called “postmodern” rupture that has characterized art worlds in recent decades. In the world of music, for instance, Kramer (2002) argues that postmodern work is structurally inconsistent, intertextual, referential, appropriative, transcendent of social hierarchies, and transparently related to the production technologies that are used in its creation. Similarly, Taylor (2002) argues that postmodernism in music is not a compositional ethic, but a mode of presentation and marketing that surrounds music making.

These are all qualities that point to the shift of creative expression from a self-contained, specialized aesthetic language to a lingua textura capable of simultaneously serving diverse communicative and transactive purposes. In Taylor’s (2002) words, “aspects of [postmodern] musical style cannot be dissociated from other factors surrounding the composition, dissemination, and reception of a work, and these other factors contribute to the sound of postmodern musics” (p. 103). That is to say, the interpenetration of aesthetics, technology and commerce is complete.

 This shift has not just taken place in the rarefied world of academic, or “serious” music, but also in the world of popular music. Gracyk (1996) argues that rock was the first musical form to emphasize the recording over live performance as the definitive objet d’art. However, such a development undermines the very notion of a definitive objet d’art, tangling the creative expressive act in a web of technology and commerce. This is why Gracyk argues that “it makes little sense to judge rock from the standpoint of noncommercial or anticommercial criteria” (p. 185).

 Other, more recent popular music styles such as dub reggae (Hebdige, 1987), hip-hop (Rose, 1994) and mash-ups (Sinnreich, 2004) embrace their discursive entanglement even more directly, using the tools of sampling, scratching, dubbing and versioning to create art works that are in many respects constituted of other forms of communication and other sounds of human activity (e.g. speech, industrial noise, commercial jingles).

Like the other new forms of cultural discourse enabled by the lingua textura discussed above, these new popular music styles have challenged the idea of intellectual property even as the legal category has grown in scope, strength and ubiquity. The notion of musical copyright, for example, is based on the traditional idea of an individual author, making a discrete work within the sphere of the arts. If there is no such thing as an individual author, a discrete work, or a separate sphere for artistic expression, then such definitions cannot hold. Similarly, in Bollier’s (2005) words, “if the justifications used by trademark law make sense in the context of the marketplace, they make much less sense now that the marketplace has become our culture” (p. 81, emphasis in original).

Yet, for my Reese’s peanut butter cup metaphor to hold together, the clash of these formerly disparate worlds would have to create something bigger and better than the sum of its parts, a newly emergent reality with internal cohesion, in which “two great tastes” would truly “taste great together.” This means that, if the lingua textura has indeed become our new cultural foundation, we have to find ways to accommodate the multiplicity of voices speaking this language, and the multiplicity of needs they communicate.

People need to be able to express themselves freely to one another secure in the knowledge that they won’t be served with subpoenas or heavy fines. Institutions must be able to organize capital and other resources for the purpose of cultural transaction secure in the knowledge that remuneration will come in one form or another. In short, a new set of laws, practices and cultural norms must emerge to accommodate these sweeping changes. That I, as a scholar, would even think to use a candy bar commercial as the metaphorical framework for a serious academic essay shows how much discourse has changed. The extent to which I am able to get away with it will be one small indication of how ready we are for these changes.

References

Adorno, T. W. (2002). On popular music. In R. Leppert (ed.), S. H. Gillespie (trans.), Essays on Music, pp. 437-469. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Adorno & Horkheimer (1972). The Dialectic of the Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder.

Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text (Stephen Heath, Ed. and trans.). New York: Hill

Bell, D. (1999). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (Special Anniversary Edition). New York: Basic Books.

Bernard-Donals, M. (1994). Jazz, rock ’n’ roll, rap and politics. Journal of Popular Culture, 28(2), 127–138.

Blacking, J. (1974). How Musical Is Man? Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Bollier, D. (2005). Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Castells, M. (2000). The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.

Frank, T. (1997a). Alternative to what?. in Frank, T. & Weiland, M. (Eds.), Commodify your dissent: salvos from the Baffler.  New York: Norton.

Frank, T. (1997b). Why Johnny can’t dissent. in Frank, T. & Weiland, M. (Eds.), Commodify your dissent: salvos from the Baffler.  New York: Norton.

Frank, T. (1997c). The Conquest of Cool. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Frith, S. (1996). Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gendron, B. (2002). Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Gracyk, T. (1996) Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. Durham: Duke University Press..

Gross, L. (1995). Art and artists on the margins. In L. Gross, ed., On the Margins of Art Worlds.

Habermas, J. (1962). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hall, S. (1996). What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture? In D. Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.

Hebdige, D. (1987). Cut 'n' mix: cultural identity and Caribbean music. London: Comedia.

Johnson, P. M. (2000). A glossary of political economy terms. Retrieved November 15, 2004 from http://www.auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/

Kramer, J. D. (2002). The nature and origins of musical postmodernism. In J. Lochhead and J. Auner (eds.) Postmodern Music, Postmodern Thought. New York: Routledge.

Lasn, K. (1999). Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America. New York: Eagle Brook.

Lessig, L. (2004). Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin

McGuire, D. (2004, November 18). D.C. college students targeted in piracy suit. WashingtonPost.com. Retrieved November 15, 2004 from http://www.lexis-nexis.com

Monge, P. R., & Contractor, N. S. (2003). Theories of communication networks. New York: Oxford University Press.

Paddison, M. (1982). The critique criticized: Adorno and popular music. Popular Music, 2, 201-218.

Peterson, R. A. & Berger, D. B. (1975). Cycles in symbol production: the case of popular music. American Sociological Review, 40, 158-173.

Peterson, R. A. & Berger, D. B. (1996). Measuring industry concentration, diversity, and innovation in popular music. American Sociological Review, 61, 175-178.

Rose, T. (1994). Black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Sinnreich, A. (2004). Mash it up!: Hearing a new musical form as an aesthetic resistance movement. National Communication Association, Chicago, 2004.

Taylor, T. D. (2002). Music and musical practices in postmodernity. In J. Lochhead and J. Auner (eds.) Postmodern Music, Postmodern Thought. New York: Routledge.

Thornton, S. (1996). Club Cultures. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

Vaidhyanathan, S. (2001). Copyrights and Copywrongs. New York: New York University Press.

Wicke, P. (1982). Rock music: a musical-aesthetic study. Popular Music, 2, 219-243.

Third Essay: Musicology

here's the final draft of my answer to the third essay question of my qualifying exams:

In Roland Barthes’ Image-Music-Text, he argues that “under the pressure of the mass long-playing record, there seems to be a flattening out of technique.” (189) Explain what Barthes means by “flattening out of technique.” Is he repeating Adorno’s critique of mass produced music, or is there room in Barthes’ cosmology for music that is produced in a standardized fashion but that nonetheless contains the potential for meaning? Finally, is Barthes right?: given home studios and the democratization of music making, can we really speak of a flattening out of technique?

In order to get to the point where we can assess the meaning, let alone the veracity, of Barthes’ quote, it will be necessary to frame it within the context of the essay it’s drawn from, ‘The Grain of the Voice,’ written in 1972. This essay is in itself a study in contradictions: brief and concise but theoretically complex; forthright and passionate but analytical and ruminative; explicitly conscious of language’s incapacity to encompass musical experience, yet adamant in its desire to accomplish exactly that task. In sum, Roland Barthes at his finest and most vexing.

The “grain” Barthes refers to in the title of the essay is a term he uses to describe what he feels is most honest, passionate, and empathetic in musical performance. This quality achieves (or is achieved by) an almost mystical union between the body of the musical performer and the body of the listener, united by some common foundation in the deepest roots of language and culture. He appreciatively describes a Russian bass, for example, as having a voice that is “brought into your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages, and from deep down in the Slavonic language, as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings” (pp. 181-2).

For me as a reader and music lover, this description brings to mind an ineffable quality which I detect in vocalists whose work I enjoy, but find absent in most popular singers from any era. Why should it be that I believe the catch in Anita O’Day’s voice but not in Diana Krall’s? Or the melisma of Chaka Khan but not that of Lauryn Hill? Or, to follow Barthes’ lead in extending the metaphor of the grain from vocal performance to instrumental, the guitar pyrotechnics of Jimi Hendrix but not those of Jeff Beck?

Bourdieu (1984) would argue that such distinctions are simply a matter of classist hierarchies predefining my cultural preferences. Cultural studies theorists from the Birmingham school of audience reception, such as Hall (Morley & Chen, 1996) and Hebdige (1979; 1987), would also argue that my judgments are subjective and have more to do with my sense of identity and my subcultural context than with any objective quality of the music per se. But there is something innately appealing, something that matches my experience as a music listener and practitioner, in Barthes’ insistence that honesty – and its absence – can be heard.

It is important to emphasize here that, for Barthes, the musical performance is not simply a frozen artifact whose level of grain-ness can be objectively determined by some system of measurement. To the contrary, Barthes makes it clear that he is not interested in codifying value judgments as Adorno (2002) does (I will continue this comparison later in the essay). He rather elegantly side-steps this conundrum by arguing that the grain is simply an extended hook, an opportunity to connect, but that real and complete musical expression exists only in a direct somatic and even “erotic” (p. 188) relationship between player and listener. In other words, it’s not so much that Anita O’Day is good and Diana Krall is bad, it’s that I perceive in the former a chance to connect that is absent in the latter, and enact that connection through engaged listening.

This still leaves the rather thorny question of whether some singers offer more grain – more of a hook – than others. Despite his unwillingness to deal in absolutes, Barthes suggests this is the case. Again elegantly side-stepping the question of value, he accomplishes this with the help of an analytical framework borrowed from Julia Kristeva, drawing a distinction between the “geno-song” and the “pheno-song.”

In this dichotomy, the geno-song represents “the space where significations germinate ‘from within the language and in its very materiality’ . . . that apex (or that depth) of production where melody explores how the language works and identifies with that work” (p. 182). In other words, the geno-song is reflexively critical of its own codes and media and therefore, through its honesty and subtlety, has the capacity to produce jouissance (orgasmic aesthetic pleasure) in the listener.

The pheno-song, by contrast, represents “everything in the performance which is in the service of communication, representation, expression . . . everything which it is customary to talk about, which forms the tissues of cultural values” (p. 182). In other words, the pheno-song is the sonic enactment of musico-social semiotics, as when a wailing electric guitar signifies the “rockness” of a pop song but little else, or when tastefully edited sounds of vinyl scratching punctuate an otherwise instrumental backing track to give a song a patina of “urban” grit. There is no opportunity for jouissance in the pheno-song, Barthes argues, only the passionless reaffirmation of existing cultural norms and expectations.

Viewed from this perspective, a performance with grain is simply one in which the performer (and the listener?) emphasize the geno-song over the pheno-song. But why should this matter, and what does it have to do with long-playing records or the “flattening” of technique? The answers are merely suggested by Barthes, never stated outright. The grain of the voice, he offers, can “hold in check the attempts at expressive reduction operated by a whole culture against the poem and its melody” (p. 184, emphasis in original). This oblique comment suggests that Barthes believes in an ongoing social dialectic in which people desiring to express themselves to one another – to communicate and achieve jouissance – are being intentionally prevented through a policy of control over aesthetic expression.

As a result of this social-aesthetic imposition, Barthes feels that people’s control over their own culture (and the quality of their emotional lives) is being lost and abdicated to commercial and political interests, that “the ‘truth’ of language” (p. 184), expressed through the grain of the voice, is ever less evident in popular cultural forms. This is a theme he explores in ‘Musica Practica’ (published 1970, same volume) as well, in which he bemoans the growing gap between music producers and consumers, embodied in a commercialized aesthetic passivity that “relieves the listener of all activity, even by procuration, and abolishes in the sphere of music the very notion of doing.” (p. 150).

This dialectic is very similar in some ways to the one described by Adorno (2002) in his anti-popular music screed ‘On Popular Music’ (published 1941). In this essay, Adorno applies his and Horkheimer’s larger critique of the “culture industry” to music in particular. According to Adorno, the process of mass production necessarily produces a popular music aesthetic that mimics the repetitiveness, standardization, and soullessness of the industry that formed it, and its listeners are necessarily duped and brainwashed into an infantilized state of helplessness. Given this process, Adorno’s alarm over such music’s potential role in clearing the way for fascist politics to emerge in the West is completely understandable.

Although Barthes, like Adorno (2002), is concerned about the aesthetic passivity inherent in mass produced music, and its potential to undermine the cultural and political power of the masses who consume it, his model differs in some significant ways. Adorno is a structural determinist – in his conception, industrial and aesthetic logics overlap completely and with total isomorphic causality. Barthes allows a bit more wiggle room, more room for agency. Structural forces cannot directly account for the processes he describes, nor can simple technological change. He isn’t suggesting that the “flattening out of technique” (read: the rise of the pheno-song) is a direct byproduct of advances in recording technology, or of any given system of labor-capital relations. In fact, the only mechanism he ever suggests for the dominance of the passive aesthetic and waning of the grain in popular music is one of “censorship by repletion” (p. 185) in which the market is flooded with so much pheno-song that it squeezes out the geno-song aesthetic.

Yet there is also something sinister about Barthes’ model that is lacking from Adorno’s (2002). For Adorno, industrialization and class warfare go hand-in-hand; the dominant classes necessarily inculcate a culture of passivity among the lower classes because that’s how the system works. For Barthes, the absence of a direct causal mechanism suggests intentionality: the forces of consolidated power are attempting to “inoculate pleasure” (p. 185) and eradicate jouissance by reducing aesthetic experience to mere semiotic communication. This, in turn, represents an institutionalization of opinion and a monopoly over meaning production (what Barthes calls the “tyranny of meaning”, p. 185). The benefits of this process to the consolidated political and commercial forces are a more predictable, more manipulable mass of citizens/consumers. The costs to the (French) masses are nothing less than the loss of music as “a space of pleasure, of thrill, a site where language works for nothing” (p. 186).

Adorno (2002) and Barthes differ in other important respects, as well. As I mentioned above, Adorno believes in the proposition that there is “good” music and “bad” music, and that its possible to analyze the difference between the two based solely on the formal qualities of the music. He also believes that the good/bad music split maps directly onto the generic distinction between “serious music” and “popular music.” Barthes, however, eschews absolute value judgments and formalism for the more fluid and ambiguous geno-song/pheno-song model, which takes the performance and the listener into account, in addition to the formal structure of the music. And far from drawing an inviolate line between art music and popular music, Barthes explicitly allows for “mass ‘good’ music” (p. 187) – in other words, “serious music” that succumbs to the deadening logic of the pheno-song – while admitting that “some popular singers have a ‘grain’ while others, however famous, do not” (p. 188).

Barthes’ willingness to discover a grain in the voices of popular singers gives definitive proof that there is, in fact, room within his cosmology for meaningful music produced by a standardized industrial and technological apparatus. Furthermore, his enthusiastic response to Panzera’s singing (the very epitome of the grain in the voice) despite (or because of) his “artificial” (p. 184) vocal technique indicates a theoretical willingness to hear the grain even through technological intermediation.

But is Barthes right? Does the geno-song/pheno-song model make any sense? Is the grain in the voice truly on the wane, and, if so, is it part of a deliberate strategy of social control and the eradication of pleasure? There is no hope for me definitively to answer these questions in the next few pages or hours, so I will review a few other related texts that bear on the issue, and weigh in with my own take in the process.

Grossberg (1992) expands on one of Barthes’ core assertions, arguing that conservative politicians’ calls during the 1980s and early 1990s to regulate and censor rock music are part of a larger plan to “constrain, police and even regulate . . . the production, distribution and consumption of art and popular culture in the United States” (p. 9). The political function of this movement, he argues, is the regulation of pleasure, which in turn becomes an instrument of social control and the maintenance of a given social order.

At the heart of such an argument is an assumption about the power of aesthetic experience, and music in particular, that is very similar to Barthes’. Grossberg (1992) believes it has the power to transform “passive reception into active production [and is] the most powerful affective agency in human life” (p. 153). Note how Grossberg’s thesis here presents a mirror image of the arguments made by Barthes and Adorno (2002). The two earlier theorists are primarily concerned that popular music will inculcate passivity among its listeners; Grossberg, on the other hand, extols its capacity to produce activity.

I agree with Barthes and Grossberg (1992) that the regulation of aesthetic expression serves an obvious political agenda – not just in our society but throughout human culture. However, I believe that there is more to be considered than simply music’s ability to produce pleasure in its listeners or to moderate their level of activity/passivity. With Attali (1985), I also believe that music has the capacity to change people’s ideas, to express, amplify and alter the dominant social organizational paradigms of a given place and time.

This potent combination of powers – social, cognitive, and affective – makes music very similar to another cultural agent whose use has historically been regulated by authoritarian social institutions: namely, controlled substances. This is a metaphor I have found very useful to explore in my own recent theorizations of music, and plan to use in my dissertation (as this idea is both still inchoate and somewhat tangential to the question at hand, I will avoid expanding on it here – but I would be happy to discuss further during the oral component of this examination).

As to the flattening out of technique, there is abundant academic literature attempting to assess whether the music in the mainstream marketplace has become more aesthetically homogeneous or heterogeneous as the structure of the music industry has changed – primarily towards market concentration and vertical integration. Peterson and Berger (1975) initiate the debate, analyzing Billboard chart data over a span of 26 years and ultimately coming to the conclusion that consolidation has produced a trend towards aesthetic homogeneity. Their findings are supported and augmented in later work, such as Rothenbuhler and Dimmick (1982), Christianen (1995) and DiCola and Thomson (2002), but refuted by scholars including Lopes (1992), Alexander (1996) and Dowd (2004). For theoretical, methodological, and ideological reasons, I tend to put more weight on the arguments showing a connection between industry consolidation and aesthetic homogeneity (although I am more sympathetic to Barthes’ tendential model than to Adorno’s [2002] absolutist one). However, it is only reasonable, on reviewing the literature, to concede that the question has yet to be answered definitively.

As I wrote above, I am also very sympathetic to Barthes’ geno-song/pheno-song model. While it is under-theorized (in his essay, at least) and prone to all the standard pitfalls of theoretical models based on strict binaries, I am intuitively attracted to it, because it matches my experiences as a musician and my observations as a music theorist.

I have long dreamed of conducting some form of mass audience research examining in depth the roles music plays in people’s lives and the ways in which they understand it to operate. Music industry consumer research I conducted as a market analyst consistently showed behavior, taste and consumption habits could divide the total population in to rather neat, discrete segments, often with very little crossover in either membership or defining traits. However, the questions I asked were always instrumental (“Have you downloaded a song from the Internet in the past three months?”) and attitudinal (“Would you be willing to pay for x, y, or z?”), offering only the slightest glimpse into my subjects’ inner lives. I have often wondered: if we could take a measure of people’s musical souls, at the ways in which they live in music, would we find neat, discrete segments? Are there some people who simply thrill to the aesthetic experience, the geno-song, while others hear only the cultural symbolism of the pheno-song?

 Psychoacoustic research (Perrot & Gjerdigan, 1999) has shown that most people can accurately predict whether they will like a song or not after hearing it for as short a time as 250 milliseconds. Aucouturier and Pachet (2003) argue that this means “humans can judge genre by using only an immediately accessible ‘surface’” (p. 89). If this is the case, then clearly we are all under the sway of the pheno-song, doomed to judge music for its cultural connotations before we ever have the opportunity to experience it aesthetically.

But this begs an important question: what’s wrong with using music instrumentally for its cultural connotations? Is the geno-song somehow more legitimate than the pheno-song? Suddenly, Barthes’ argument strikes me as yet another bourgeois re-affirmation of the individualist, art-for-art’s-sake philosophy decried by Benjamin (1968) and so many more recent cultural theorists. If music is rooted in community and collectivity, then the pheno-song has always played a role vital to society – one inextricable from the function of the geno-song. Maybe devotees of the geno-song (such as myself) are simply a bunch of cultural aphasics who can’t see the forest for the trees.

I can’t resolve this dilemma in this essay because I have yet to resolve it in my own mind. Clearly, both the geno-song and the pheno-song – individual aesthetic expression and cultural convention – exist for a reason, and probably could not exist independently of one another. If this is the case, then the pheno-centric music industry and geno-centric snobs of the academy are equally at fault for missing the point. And the mythical “masses”, far from being cultural dupes or heroic freedom fighters, are the only ones who really understand music because they live in it non-ideologically, sometimes connecting with its emotive power, at other times wearing it like a fashion accessory. I don’t know, this answer also seems a little too pat. I am still struggling with it.

I realize I have now reached the end of this essay without addressing the question of home studios and the democratization of music-making, so I will attempt to treat this in brief. I share with Barthes and Attali (1985) a sense of disappointment and apprehension at the historical trend towards a division of labor between music producers and consumers. I love making music, and I think the world would be a better place if more people had access to the skill, perceived self-efficacy, and cultural institutions that are necessary for music production. I believe that we are both strategically (i.e. conservative censorship) and systematically (i.e. industrial capitalism) discouraged from acquiring these resources, and also believe that people’s innate need to express themselves, to communicate aesthetically, endures as a latent source of resistance against these forces.

Thus, when a new technology for decentralized music production (i.e. home studios) or distribution (i.e. peer-to-peer file sharing networks) emerges, it is no surprise that this shift in the environment would have a democratizing effect on musical practices. However, I am very hesitant to start proclaiming full-scale revolution for a number of reasons. First, like Barthes, I shy away from structural and technological determinism – in other words, these changes are no more certain to liberate people than prior conditions were certain to enslave them. Any macro-level effect is emergent and tendential at best.

Second, I think that the dominant aesthetic of our culture is still determined by the marketplace, and that this dynamic is unlikely to change unless and until the decentralization of information flow or other forces of change destabilize and re-order the flows of capital and power in our society. Right now, no amount of grainy (in both senses of the word), independently-produced music available on Grokster is going to dislodge the hegemony of smooth, flat commercial music pumped into our aesthetic environment by billions of dollars in marketing and promotion. And as long as this aesthetic persists, so will the division-of-labor ethic it promotes, thus discouraging people from forming musical community on any massive scale despite the democratization of access to the means of production.

Finally, I am not confident that this democratization is a meaningful, long-term trend. I mean this in two senses. First, I don’t believe that the production and distribution of music has been democratized in any absolute sense. Even the poorest, most disenfranchised individuals have always have the capacity to sing to one another. Rather, I see the rising availability of home studio technology as something akin to technological escalation in an arms race. The music industry considerably raised the bar for recorded music quality in the 1970s with the invention of modern studio techniques and the compact disc (which, incidentally, followed the last democratized music movement – i.e. folk/rock in the 1960s). Now that modern studio equipment and CD-burners are available cheaply and easily to consumers, the industry is feverishly exploring other bar-raising options (such as high-definition, surround-sound discs and new levels of studio wizardry embodied by “super-producers” such as the Neptunes). I see no reason for this cycle to stop now.

Second, I am not at all convinced that the technologies behind our current wave of democratization are here to stay. As I have argued elsewhere (e.g. as an expert witness in a file-sharing lawsuit), I have no doubt that the peer-to-peer genie is out of the box, and that no amount of legal action can ever put it back in. However, a concerted effort by the media and technology industries (itself no mean feat) could theoretically erect several additional barriers to file sharing, fragmenting its user base. While this would have very little effect on the availability of free Britney Spears MP3s, it would force independent musicians looking for an avenue of distribution to work exponentially harder to reach a large audience (a conspiratorially-minded person could potentially conclude that this is, in fact, one of the strategic purposes for industry action against P2P communities), essentially forcing them back into the waiting arms of the centralized, commercial music marketplace, and into the cultural logic of the pheno-song.

References

Adorno, T. W. (2002). On popular music. In R. Leppert (ed.), S. H. Gillespie (trans.), Essays on Music, pp. 437-469. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Alexander, P. J. (1996). Entropy and popular culture: product diversity in the popular music recording industry. American Sociological Review, 61, 171-174.

Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1977)

Aucouturier, J.-J., & Pachet, F. (2003). Representing musical genre: a state of the art. Journal of New Music Research, 32(1), 83-93.

Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text (Stephen Heath, Ed. and trans.). New York: Hill

Benjamin, W. (1968). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In Illuminations. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Christianen, M. (1995). Cycles in symbol production? A new model to explain concentration, diversity and innovation in the music industry. Popular Music, 14(1), 55-93.

DiCola, P., & Thomson, K. (2002). Radio deregulation: has it served citizens and musicians? Washington, D.C.: Future of Music Coalition.

Dowd, T. J. (2004). Concentration and diversity revisited: production logics and the U.S. mainstream recording market, 1940-1990. Social Forces, 82(4), 1411-1455.

Grossberg, L. (1992). We Gotta Get Out of This Place. New York: Routledge.

Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: the meaning of style. New York: Methuen.

Hebdige, D. (1987). Cut 'n' mix: cultural identity and Caribbean music. London: Comedia.

Lopes, P. D. (1992). Innovation and diversity in the popular music industry, 1969 to 1990. American Sociological Review, 57(1), 56-71.

Morley, D. & Chen, K.-H. (1996). Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.

Perrot, D., & Gjerdigen, R. O. (1999). Scanning the dial: An exploration of factors in the identification of musical style. Paper presented at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition.

Peterson, R. A. & Berger, D. B. (1975). Cycles in symbol production: the case of popular music. American Sociological Review, 40, 158-173.

Rothenbuhler, E. & Dimmick, J. (1982). Popular music: concentration and diversity in the industry, 1974-1980. Journal of Communication, 32, 143-149.

Second Essay: Network Society and Communication Policy

here's the final draft of essay # 2, network society and communication policy. i actually think it's pretty good, for 2 days worth of work...

 Pick three network theories which have relevance for communication policy, justifying your selection. Briefly explicate the core assertions of the theories and explain why you think they are interesting. Compare the implications of these theories for selected communication policies. Do these policies take full advantage of the theoretical insights? If not, what would be the benefits and the drawbacks if current policies were changed to conform to the theories?

1. Evolutionary and Coevolutionary Theories

 The first network theory I would like to explore in relationship to communication policies is evolutionary and coevolutionary theory, elements of which have the capacity to shed some light on ongoing debates over the use of the electromagnetic spectrum by communication and media organizations. This is because spectrum is often described as a scarce resource, and evolutionary theory “emphasizes competition and cooperation among organizational populations for scarce resources that exist in their mutual environments” (Monge & Contractor, 2003).

 Evolutionary systems are based on three fundamental mechanisms: variation, selection and retention. Variation refers to organizational change, either intentional or unintentional. Selection refers to the process whereby some variations are chosen over others. Retention refers to the process by which selected variations become integral to the organizations that adopt them (Monge & Contractor, 2003).

 The evolutionary processes described in the literature on organizational change has been characterized by Baum (1996) as falling into three categories: demographic processes (e.g. advantages accruing to larger and more tenured organizations), ecological processes (e.g. niche width dynamics, population dynamics, density dependence, and community interdependence), and environmental processes (e.g. political upheaval, governmental regulation, and institutional linkages). As I will discuss shortly, I believe that all three of these processes have relevance to the question of spectrum regulation and allocation.

Coevolutionary theory expands the understanding of these mechanisms and processes to encompass multiple populations and niches. Coevolutionary processes describe a broad range of interrelationships between different species of organization dependent upon different types of resources in different environments. In the words of Monge and Contractor (2003), “often organizations must compete, but under some conditions organizations from different populations can also cooperate, seeking mutually beneficial outcomes.” (p. 257). This is exactly the kind of dynamic I feel to be at work in the alliances and divisions between organizations in the current regulatory battles over spectrum policy.

The question of how to allocate electromagnetic spectrum resources is vital to the growth and success of organizations in the fields of media, communications, computing, consumer electronics, and the military, to name a few. Although there are theoretically an infinite number of frequencies along the spectrum, and even though the same frequency can theoretically be used simultaneously for several divergent purposes without conflicting, technological limitations have historically mitigated the functionality of this resource, producing “interference” when rival interests both wish to use a given range of frequencies within a given geographical space. Thus, the conventional understanding of the issue, “supported by over a century of technological experience and 70 years of regulatory habit, views spectrum . . . as a scarce resource that must be allocated by governments or bought and sold like property” (Economist, 2004).

However, new technologies, such as wideband, digital television and radio broadcasting protocols, and mesh networking, have drastically increased the amount of information that can successfully be transmitted via the electromagnetic spectrum. In terms of evolutionary theory, the environmental “niche” defined by the spectrum has exponentially increased its potential carrying capacity. Put another way, the electromagnetic spectrum has ceased to represent a scarce resource.

Although this increase in carrying capacity would seem to represent a net benefit for consumers and society in general, it poses a significant challenge to the organizations that have historically benefited from oligarchical control over the spectrum – namely, broadcasters and communications companies. Consequently, industry lobbyists such as the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) have consistently attempted (and often succeeded) to influence policy in such a way that would prevent other organizations from taking advantage of the electromagnetic spectrum’s new carrying capacity. Meanwhile, these other organizations, dedicated to opening up the spectrum for competition and innovation, have banded together to form their own lobbying entities. In the words of one journalist who covers this market, “the battle over spectrum space has been a lobbying game” (Clark, 2005).

This dynamic is exemplary of the evolutionary process applied to organizations. As Monge and Contractor (2003) explain, “forces, often random, introduce change; existing practices, representing inertia, resist change. Evolution explores the constant tension between these two pressures” (p. 247, italics in original). If we return to Baum’s (1996) enumeration of the processes at work in evolutionary theory, we can see that each of them is pertinent to the situation as well. Demographic processes are at work in the competitive advantage (represented as financial strength and successful lobbying) recognized by the older and larger companies already inhabiting the spectrum niche. Ecological processes are also at work; by attempting to delay the introduction of spectrum-enhancing technologies through lobbying and stonewalling on technological standards (McChesney, 2004), the established organizations are attempting to manipulate the “niche width” and “density dependence” of their resources. Lastly, environmental processes – government regulation and the effects of new technologies – are the dominant forces influencing the success or failure of the organizations occupying the spectrum niche.

The lobbying efforts of the NAB and other such organizations can be further understood with the aid of other aspects of evolutionary and coevolutionary theory as well. From a neo-institutional perspective (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Monge & Contractor, 2003), lobbying can be understood as a form of “coercive isomorphism” in which organizations band together collectively to influence their regulatory environment to their mutual advantage. Aldrich (1999) and Astley and Fombrun (1983) would call this kind of collaboration “commensalism” – a relationship between like organizations that make similar demands on the environment.

Finally, coevolutionary theory would view the collective action of the broadcasters – from lobbying to technological stonewalling – as an example of an organizational community, defined as “a set of coevolving organizational populations joined by ties of commensalisms and symbiosis through their orientation to a common technology, normative order, or legal-regulatory regime” (Aldrich, 1999, p. 301; quoted in Monge & Contractor, 2003). Such communities can serve as a “buffer” between member organizations and their environment, thus regulating access to and use of resources.

Federal communications policy relating to spectrum allocation has thus far been much more responsive to the needs of the entrenched organizations than to the needs of innovators and upstarts (to say nothing of consumers). However, there is ample support for the argument that “any number of transmitters and receivers can peacefully co-exist on the airwaves and that spectrum should therefore be open to all – not individual property, but rather a commons” (Economist, 2004).

By paying more attention to evolutionary and coevolutionary theories, regulatory bodies like the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) may more easily recognize and respond to the ways in which broadcasters are successfully manipulating their environments to their own advantage, and to the disadvantage of competitors and consumers. To draw a political argument from a theoretical one, I will close by quoting Monge and Contractor (2003): “all the species relevant to a specific niche must be considered in an analysis of any niche and its carrying capacity” (p. 252, italics added).

2. Structural Holes

 Another network theory that has many implications for communication policy is Burt’s (1992; 1997) theory of structural holes. A structural hole is a “relationship of nonredundancy between two contacts” (Burt, 1992, p. 18) in a network, with redundancy measured both in terms of cohesion (direct connection from one node to another) and in terms of structural equivalence (similar or overlapping sets of relationships between two nodes).

 Structural holes, according to Burt (1992; 1997), are important indicators and mechanisms of social capital within a network. Social capital is defined as “relationships with other players” that offer “opportunities to use . . . financial and human capital” (Burt, 1992, pp. 8-9). In other words, a network of relationships enables people to invest financial and human capital (e.g., talent) in order to acquire personal profit. The structural hole is the most valuable feature of such a network, because it represents “an opportunity to broker the flow of information between people and control the form of projects that bring together people from opposite sides of the hole” (Burt, 1997, p. 340).

 Entrepreneurs who take advantage of the investment opportunities offered by structural holes are referred to as brokers or, in the words of Simmel (1923), as the tertius gaudens (literally, “the third who benefits”). Burt (1992; 1997; 1998; 2002) and others (Ahuja, 2000; Hargadon & Sutton, 1997; Walker, Kogut & Shan, 1997) have devoted considerable energy towards exploring the diverse structures and strategies related to brokerage across structural holes. The essential finding from this body of research is that the tertius gains power by serving as a bridge between two non-redundant parties, brokering information and resources and playing the two parties against one another.

 The tertius does not operate in a vacuum, however. There is another important structural position influencing the opportunities for exploitation of structural holes. Burt (1992) warns that “transactions are always embedded in a broader relationship of some kind” (p. 234). Consequently, he emphasizes the role of the “fifth player,” a regulatory node that “sets relationship expectations and outer limits” (p. 235) for the entire network. Because the structural holes are embedded in regulatory environments created by fifth players, the tertii’s opportunities for exploitation are constrained. Thus, regardless of the apparent power benefits afforded by a network rich in structural holes, brokers only have the freedom to operate within the “may-must-can-cannot rules” (p. 235) created by fifth players.

 It is easy to see why Burt’s theory of structural holes has many applications with regards to communication policy. Information has become an ever more vital resource for survival and success in this social epoch. In the words of McNeill and McNeill (2003), “at present, human society is one huge web of cooperation and competition, sustained by massive flows of information and energy” (p. 322). Similarly, scholars from Castells (2000) to Bell (1999) to Giddens (1990) have theorized massive social change based on the reorganization and acceleration of information flows and the increasingly central role information plays as a form (if not the primary form) of capital.

 Consequently, the power of the tertius, or information broker, has increased commensurately with these changes. Like any form of capital, information is distributed unevenly throughout our society, creating structural nonredundancies between different individuals and institutions (for instance, between the government and its citizens, between a corporation and its shareholders, or between researchers and the public). The gaps between these nonredundant nodes in the network are often filled by specialized organizations playing the role of the tertius – in other words, media organizations.

 The tertius role of media organizations can be observed in much of the media studies literature, despite the absence of explicit network analysis. Such literature often refers to the role the media may play as either “gatekeepers” (Fang, 1997; Lopes, 1992; Low, 2000) or “bottlenecks” (Bar & Sandvig, 2000; DiCola & Thomson, 2002). These metaphors, which suggest a power dynamic based on brokerage, also appear in network theory literature on structural holes (Burt, 1992; Corra & Willer, 2002; Waguespack & Fleming, 2004).

 Media organizations can also serve as brokers between other media organizations and the public, as when a newspaper publishes a syndicated article, or when a cable company with a programming division distributes programming from rival organizations. The strategic value of brokering such relationships has led to a market environment in which media organizations are vertically integrating – acquiring and linking business units throughout the information supply and distribution chain. This can be directly understood as a tertius strategy. As McChesney (2004) observes, “Vertical integration is a powerful stimulant to concentration; once a few firms in an industry move in this direction, others must follow suit or they can find themselves at an insurmountable disadvantage – possibly blocked at all turns by opposing gatekeepers” (p. 180, italics added). As a result of this process, the media industry becomes increasingly consolidated in the hands of a few organizations, thus increasing the network centrality of these organizations, and boosting their social power as brokers of information.

 Consequently, in order to mitigate the power of media organizations as tertius nodes in the social information network, the government must constantly act as a fifth player, artificially constraining the capacity of these organizations to exploit their structural roles. In practical terms, this means limiting the ability of such firms to integrate vertically and horizontally, setting and enforcing standards for the diversity of media content (such as the range of political viewpoints represented), and providing a conduit for the public to express their satisfaction, dissatisfaction, needs and desires with regards to the media.

 In each of these respects, the FCC has increasingly failed to mitigate the tertius power of media organizations over the past few decades. As scholars like McChesney (2004) and Bagdikian (2004) have shown, the regulatory organization has recently used its role as fifth player to increase, rather than decrease, their power. Restrictions on media outlet ownership caps and cross-media ownership have been rolled back drastically (especially in the case of the 1996 Telecommunications Act). Controls on viewpoint diversity, represented by the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine,” were repealed in 1987. And the license renewal process for television and radio broadcasters, which is supposed to reflect public interest and incorporate public feedback, has recently (2003) been characterized as a “farce” by FCC member Michael Copps (McChesney, 2004, p. 44).

The end result of these policies has arguably been the greatest consolidation of tertius power over information flow in the history of our republic, at a time when information has reached its zenith as a social currency. I would argue that network analysis – specifically structural hole theory – is a valuable tool to demonstrate this fact and to support an argument for a change in regulatory regime that would reverse the trend and initiate a more democratic information economy.

As a parting thought, I would hasten to add that sometimes ill-conceived communication regulation can be at least as damaging as no regulation at all. In recent research (Sinnreich & Monge, 2004), I have shown that “payola” laws restricting the financial dealings of record labels and radio stations have created an “enforced structural hole” in the music industry network, unintentionally guaranteeing the emergence and maintaining the strength of a very powerful class of tertius organizations known as independent promoters. Thus, the role of the government as a “fifth player” in the information network amounts to more than simply choosing whether and what to regulate – it requires both vigilance and subtlety, the willingness to explore the ramifications of every regulatory decision, and to change those decisions when necessary. Network analysis and structural hole theory could play a vital role in this process.

3. Knowledge Networks and Transactive Memory 

 The final network theory I’d like to address is the theory of knowledge networks and transactive memory. Although I have far less experience with this theory than I do with the other two, I believe it holds great promise as an intellectual framework for understanding issues of social inequality in an information society, and may point to solutions for addressing these inequities through communication policy.

 A knowledge network (as its name would suggest) can be understood as a set of relations between nodes possessing knowledge of one kind or another – for instance, work skills, domain expertise, or strategically valuable information (Monge & Contractor, 2003). These nodes may singular or organizational, human or non-human (e.g. experts, computer files, libraries, university departments). It is useful in considering these networks to recall Bell’s (1999) distinction between simple data, information and knowledge. Information, in his schema, is contextualized data, while knowledge represents information that can be applied to practice. Similarly, Castells (2000) contrasts skills, which are static and unchanging (e.g. replacing a flat tire), to knowledge, which is flexible and broadly applicable (e.g. understanding how a car works). Although such distinctions may seem like hair-splitting, it is important to understand that knowledge is something that can be applied rather than simply acquired.

 According to transactive memory theory, no member of a knowledge network can possibly know with certainty which pieces of knowledge are stored by which nodes, and what the structure of relations between those nodes is (one can imagine a story by Jorge Luis Borges exploring the epistemological ramifications of this dilemma). Consequently, each node in the network possesses a cognitive knowledge network ­– a unique (and incomplete) understanding of the knowledge network’s dimensions and his own relation to it.

 This brings us, finally, to the idea of transactive memory – a process whereby nodes in a knowledge network use their personal cognitive knowledge networks to “facilitate the flows of knowledge among actors within the network, thereby reducing the need for each actor to possess skills or expertise available elsewhere in the knowledge network” (Monge & Contractor, 2003, p. 199). In other words, transactive memory represents a negotiated division of intellectual labor that sacrifices comprehensive (or heterogeneous) knowledge by any single node for network-wide efficiency and maximized knowledge storage and retrievability.

 The theory of transactive memory is commonly applied to working relationships, such as co-workers in an office or spouses in a marriage. Thus, I remember where my wife’s glasses are and she remembers what happened to the twenty dollar bill I had in my wallet yesterday. However, I believe the theory can also be applied to society(ies) as a whole, and to the emergent patterns of social inequality that both cause and result from the differential levels of access to knowledge.

 Bell (1999), Castells (2000), and Giddens (1990) have all devoted significant quantities of ink to the changes society has undergone and continues to undergo as a result of the growth of a global communication network infrastructure (I referred to these arguments earlier in reference to the growing power of media organizations). Each of these theorists would agree that knowledge plays an increasingly vital role in shaping economic and political power. For instance, Bell argues that Marx’s “labor theory of value” no longer applies to our information economy, positing instead a “knowledge theory of value” (p. xvii) in which knowledge supplants labor and capital as the fundamental building block of commerce.

 Although Bell (1999) contrasts capital (a scarce and dwindling resource) to knowledge (a renewable and accretive resource), the rising tide of the knowledge economy doesn’t necessarily float all boats. In fact, transactive memory systems, by definition, represent differential knowledge distribution, and this differential is only increased by the presence of an electronic communication infrastructure within the knowledge network. In the words of Monge and Contractor (2003), “communication networks influence the degree of knowledge differentiation among members [of transactive memory systems] and the accuracy of their cognitive knowledge networks” (p. 203).

 In other words, as our society becomes increasingly mediated and globalized, and as knowledge becomes increasingly valuable as a form of social, economic and political capital, the members of society are becoming increasingly differentiated in the distribution of knowledge. This means that each node has access to less vital knowledge within his own experience and that of the people closest to him, and that he must rely increasingly on his cognitive knowledge network – mediated by the global communication infrastructure – to gain access to the resources that are vital to his survival and success.

This, in turn, has social implications. Small differences in a person’s capacity to access the mechanisms of transactive memory (such as computer skills) or added links in the social chain separating a person from the knowledge he needs, can drastically reduce his power and competitiveness relative to other members of society. And as the knowledge gap hypothesis explains (Gaziano & Gaziano, 1999; Rogers, 2000, 2003; Tichenor, Donohue & Olien, 1970), the people most likely to lack these skills and social connections are exactly those who lack social power in the first place – i.e. economically and politically disadvantaged groups such as racial minorities, rural communities and the elderly. Thus, the growing knowledge economy spurs a recursive process in which disenfranchised people become ever more disenfranchised in a continuing and self-feeding cycle.

This trend is exacerbated by an added tangle: as knowledge networks grow to exceed the size of a community, the mechanisms by which transactive memory is achieved increasingly rely on superficial judgments rather than first-hand experience. As Monge and Contractor (2003) explain, fundamental processes such as expertise recognition, retrieval coordination, directory updating and information allocation, to an increasing degree, “may be based on stereotypes of what others ‘should’ know” (p. 199) rather than what people actually know. Another way to put this is that, as the size of a knowledge network grows, people’s cognitive knowledge networks become less reliable, and more prone to snap judgments based on stereotype. It is easy to see that this, too, leads to a recursive process in which people already excluded from the network relationships and expertise vital to their success are increasingly subject to such exclusion over time.

From a policy standpoint, I can think of no quick-and-dirty silver bullet to solve these problems. The trends toward globalization and the growth of the knowledge economy are unlikely to reverse, and the structural dynamics of knowledge networks are unlikely to change. However, an understanding of knowledge networks and transactive memory may help regulatory bodies and other organizations to mitigate the effects of these trends by more accurately measuring the gaps in the global knowledge network and staging intelligently-planned interventions at both the social and the infrastructural level. If we can take advantage of network theory (such as the “small-world hypothesis” [Watts, 1999]) to intervene by shortening the diameter of knowledge networks, and influence the messages carried by the mass media to lessen or remove the social stigmas associated with racial and other stereotypes, then we will have made significant strides in the right direction.

References

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Baum, J. A. C. (1996). Organizational ecology. In S. Clegg, C. Hardy & W. Nord (Eds.), Handbook of organizational studies (pp. 77-114). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Burt, R. S. (1998). The gender of social capital. Rationality and Society, 10, 5-46.

Burt, R. S. (2002). Bridge decay. Social Networks, 24, 333-363.

Castells, M. (2000). The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.

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DiCola, P., & Thomson, K. (2002). Radio deregulation: has it served citizens and musicians? Washington, D.C.: Future of Music Coalition.

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Fang, I. (1997). A history of mass communication: Six information revolutions. Burlington, MA: Focal Press.

Gaziano, E., & Gaziano, C. (1999). Social control, social change and the knowledge gap hypothesis. In D. Demers & K. Viswanath (Eds.), Mass Media, Social Control, and Social Change: A Macrosocial Perspective. Ames, IW: Iowa State University Press.

Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Hargadon, A. & Sutton, R. I. (1997). Technology brokering and innovation in a product development firm. Administrative science quarterly, 42(4), 716-749.

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Walker, G., Kogut, B., & Shan, W. (1997). Social capital, structural holes, and the formation of an industry network. Organizational Science, 8, 109-125.

Watts, D. J. (1999). Networks, dynamics, and the small-world phenomenon. The American Journal of Sociology, 105(2), 493-527

First Essay: Cultural Studies

here's the final draft of my first essay.

Many cultural studies scholars have focused on music as a particular kind of cultural form through which cultural flows, bricolage, pastiche, incorporation, and cross cultural and cross ethnic appropriations are accomplished.  Examine and distinguish the arguments these scholars have made about music, and make an argument of your own for why music can be distinguished for other cultural forms (or not) at the level of cultural innovation and global cultural migrations.

 Music is sticky stuff. Ideas, values and attitudes have a tendency to cling to it, coloring our phenomenological experience of it with a broad symbolic palate. Music’s stickiness also allows the ideas that cling to it to travel where it travels, change as it changes, and to collide and merge with other ideas when music does the same. From a cultural perspective, this means that music is often central to the construction of identity and to the process of social change. From a scholarly perspective, this means that music often serves as a perfect example for whichever social theory an author happens to espouse. In other words, cultural studies literature contains as many different theorizations of music as there are theories of culture.

However, from this multiplicity of viewpoints, a few dominant questions emerge: Does music serve hegemonic power, or act as a conduit of resistance? Does music precede social change, or reflect it? How does the historical role of music change in an era of mass media? Is music’s meaning a product of its generative structures, the intent of its producers, an inherent quality of its form, or something produced through the act of listening? Although an exhaustive review of the answers theorists have posed to these questions could easily fill a (very interesting) book, I will attempt in this paper to outline the debates in broad brushstrokes.

 Adorno (2002) is among the first cultural studies scholars to actively take on music as a subject of analysis. His groundbreaking (and much-maligned) essay ‘On Popular Music’ is primarily concerned with distinguishing between “popular” and “serious” music, and the opposing roles these two cultural forms take in shaping society. Theoretically, the essay is an extension of the ideas expressed in Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1972) The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, which serves as something of a manifesto for the Frankfurt School of cultural studies. In this book, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that mass production, communication media and the “absolute power of capitalism” (p. 120) have combined in the form of the “culture industry” to produce a symbolic environment they refer to as “mass culture.”

The problem with mass culture, according to Adorno and Horkheimer (1972), is that, by systematizing and “pre-chewing” cultural information, the culture industry inculcates a form of passivity among its audience (the lower classes), who are then brainwashed and made the dupes of the powerful elite. This process, they argue, is tantamount to – or, at the very least, opens the door to – political fascism.

 For Adorno (2002), the machinery of this process can be gleaned by comparing the aesthetic principles of popular music to those of serious music. Popular music, he argues, is repetitious, infantile, and interchangeable – much like any commodity created by mass production processes. These qualities undermine a listener’s agency by depriving him of the opportunity (and, ultimately, the ability) to interpret musical information for himself. As a result, the listener is forced into “a system of response mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society” (p. 422).

Serious music, by contrast, is self-contained, teleological and unique. The listener can only access its meaning dialectically, by engaging with the music on its own terms, and on its own time. This active engagement, in turn, encourages individuality and agency in the listener, which produces a self-aware, critical and politically self-reliant society. Adorno apparently never considers the logical impossibility of this argument: how can a listener be compelled to be free? If the music and the media have absolute power to shape the minds of their audience, then there can be no appreciable difference in liberty or individuality between a popular music listener and a serious music listener.

Benjamin (1968) provides one of the most potent arguments against Adorno (2002), although he does not address music as a subject distinct from other “art.” He agrees with Adorno that mass production, and the reproducibility of aesthetic information, profoundly change the role that arts play in society. Reproducibility, he argues, destroys the “aura” of artworks as unique and irreplaceable objects, invaluable outpourings of creative genius. However, Benjamin sees this as a good thing. “For the first time in world history,” he writes, “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. . . . Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.” (p. 224).

In other words, mechanical reproduction frees the audience for art (and music) from the constraints of the hierarchical, elitist “art-for-art’s-sake” model of meaning production, and opens up a discursive field in which the power to create meaning is far more decentralized, contentious, and transient. In this context, art gains a new political functionality. As we shall see in our later discussion of the Birmingham school, Benjamin’s (1968) point of view is brilliantly ahead of its time.

 More recent scholars have directly confronted Adorno (2002), seeking both to illuminate the holes in his argument and to reclaim what is valuable in it. Paddison (1982), for example, argues that Adorno is correct in distinguishing between music that is inherently critical (thus allowing resistance) and inherently uncritical (thus compelling passivity). However, Paddison faults Adorno for failing to distinguish between the critical/uncritical binary and the serious/popular binary. If Adorno weren’t blinded by his own “irrational prejudices” (p. 208) against popular music, Paddison argues, he would have recognized that any genre of music may contain both critical and uncritical works.

Paddison (1982) looks to Adorno’s writings on art (e.g. Minima Moralia) to show that his theories allow for the possibility of resistant music distributed via the mass media. Resistance may be achieved, According to Adorno, by drawing on aesthetic “left-overs” and recontextualizing them in a critical way. Although Paddison doesn’t explicitly make this connection, it may be argued that hip-hop, mash-ups, and other forms of musical bricolage fit this bill to a tee. However, Paddison agrees with Adorno that structural forces may have the capacity to trump even the most resistant aesthetic processes: “increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of marketing and distribution make it ever more difficult for any music – whether serious or popular, traditional or avant-garde, Western or non-Western – to resist its fate as a commodity” (p. 217).

All of the theorists I have discussed thus far are primarily concerned with the interplay between structural and agentic power among music audiences. However, some theorists would argue that the very notion of an audience as a separate class of individual from musical performers is itself the product of a systemic disequilibrium between structural and agentic forces. Barthes (1977), for example, distinguishes between music made to be played and music made to be listened to. The function of technically challenging and theoretically dense music such as Beethoven, he argues, is to render amateurs incapable of playing music for themselves – not necessarily because they lack the physical skill, but because they lack the aesthetic code and the material resources.

According to Barthes (1977), Beethoven wrote fundamentally orchestral music that demanded a conductor, which thus could not be translated into the context of the popular (amateur) musical praxis of his time – e.g. small-group ensembles or soloists. In other words, Beethoven’s aesthetic contains structural imperatives privileging social dynamics such as hierarchy, mechanistic organization, and professionalism. Seen through this lens, it is impossible to view the elevation and dominance of Beethoven’s aesthetic separately from the rise of industrialized society, and from the social reorganization that accompanied it. The end results of this aesthetic-structural shift, according to Barthes, are very similar to the effects Adorno (2002) attributed to popular music: the professional musician becomes a “technician, who relieves the listener of all activity, even by procuration, and abolishes in the sphere of music the very notion of doing.” (p. 150, emphasis in original).

Attali (1985) makes some arguments similar to Barthes’ (1977), although he posits a more cyclical and complex relationship between structural and aesthetic codes. Like Barthes, Attali views the separation of musical production and consumption warily, and interprets the rupture as a function of the demands made by structural forces. For Attali, musical expression is a form of collective social imagination, and changes in musical aesthetic codes thus presage social or organizational change, the one sowing the seeds for the other. In his words, “all music, any organization of sounds is . . . a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community” (p. 6).

Because of its capacity to spur social change, Attali (1985) argues, music is inherently resistant, and poses a constant threat to power. Thus, vested powers have historically attempted to channel and control the production and distribution of musical information. It is through this lens that Attali interprets the gradual professionalization of (European) musicians, which he traces to the fourteenth century enclosure of musical production within the feudal courts. Although music had previously been integrated into daily existence and practiced by nearly every member of society, Attali writes that at this point “musicians became professionals bound to a single master, domestics, producers of spectacles exclusively reserved for a minority” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

This distancing between consumers and producers was made complete, Attali (1985) argues, in the age of capitalism and mass production. Today, he writes, the musician/consumer dialectic both reflects and reproduces the central division of labor at the heart of the capitalist system. However, unlike Adorno (2002), Attali sees a light at the end of the tunnel; beyond the “repetition” that marks industrial society, he sees a new model of musical practice, which he calls “composition.” In this nascent model of musical and social organization, power over the distribution of aesthetic codes becomes decentralized, leading to a utopian rupture, “transforming the world into an art form and life into a shifting pleasure” (p. 147). Although I think this model, like all utopian visions, can be more usefully understood as a vector of change than as a destination, I think it is a valuable framework within which to understand the changes characterizing musical culture today (e.g. peer-to-peer music distribution, online collaboration and performance).

Frith (1996), like Attali (1985), views the historical professionalization of music as a function of social control. He shares Attali’s view that music communicates possibilities for social change through aesthetic means, and thus, poses a threat to entrenched power. In his words, “music gives us a real experience of what the ideal could be” (p. 274). Unlike Attali, however, he views the producer/consumer binary primarily as a map for high/low cultural distinctions (such as those espoused by Adorno [2002]), which in turn map onto social hierarchies, such as race and class. This relationship is, in his model, bi-directional: “pop tastes do not just derive from our socially constructed identities; they also help to shape them” (p. 276). Also unlike Attali, Frith acknowledges that despite the power of these codified aesthetic boundaries, many (if not most) people have historically transcended them in one way or another. Thus, he does not need to resort to Attali’s utopian hopes for the future – instead, he identifies the possibility of agency and self-determination today, within the existing system.

If Frith (1996) owes much of his musical-social model to Attali (1985), he owes just as much to Bourdieu (1984). For Bourdieu, musical taste (like any other taste, from food to film to fashion) is produced and organized through a complex web of social and institutional relations called “the habitus” and artificially normalized to the point where personal taste appears to be innate, rather than socially acquired. This process of taste-production serves one primary function: to establish and legitimate class distinctions. In his oft-quoted words, “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (p. 6).

According to Bourdieu (1984), taste-based class distinctions are not simply reflected in generic preferences (e.g. opera vs. country & western), but also in the very attitude one brings to aesthetic experience. High art, which reflects and constitutes the tastes of the upper class, demands a different mode of engagement (which Bourdieu refers to as the “aesthetic disposition”) than lowbrow or middlebrow culture. In Bourdieu’s words, “Intellectuals could be said to believe in the representation – literature, theatre, painting – more than in the things represented, whereas the people chiefly expect representations and the conventions which govern them to allow them to believe ‘naively’ in the things represented” (p. 5).

This aesthetic distancing from the subject of representation, Bourdieu (1984) argues, is the point and the sole meaning of high art (at least since the nineteenth century). It produces a commensurate distance between the individual and the world at large – a distance which is both the luxury of an elite class without material concerns and the necessary attitude of a ruling class sustained by the exploitation of others. Frith (1996) quibbles with Bourdieu on this point, arguing that Bourdieu’s understanding of art’s meaning misses the communicative aspects that make art art, or music music. Distinction doesn’t necessarily need to be hierarchical, Frith argues; for instance, two people can build a friendship on a common love for Miles Davis or Britney Spears. Thus, he argues, a full understanding of music’s social role would have to include both its representational and its semiotic content.

Nearly all of the theorists I have reviewed at this point – from Adorno (2002) to Barthes (1977) to Attali (1985) to Bourdieu (1984) – would agree that the meaning of music is related, to a greater or lesser degree, with the structural forces that shaped its production, and that this meaning can be understood simply by conducting structural and formal analysis. However, the Birmingham school and its followers – Hall (1996a; 1996b), Hebdige (1979; 1987) and Morley (2000), for example – would ascribe a larger role to audience reception in the production of musical meaning.

Rather than describing the ways in which music “effects” listeners, these theorists take a deeper interest in exploring the ways in which people “use” music strategically to achieve their social and political ambitions, from identity construction to political message dissemination to social intervention. Hall (1996a) sets the tone for much of this research, arguing for a model of constrained agency, in which music listeners (and producers) have a degree of power over the production of meaning, but are also limited by the “net of constraints, the ‘conditions of existence’ for practical thought and calculation about society” (p. 44) that surround them.

Despite these limitations, Hall (1996b) feels that the cultural arena is an essential site of resistance for disempowered groups or individuals. The decentring of global power following the collapse of European hegemony, he argues, “opens up new spaces of contestation . . . thus presenting us with a strategic and important opportunity for intervention in the popular cultural field” (p. 466).

According to Hall (1996b), this combination of constraint and agency, subjugation and opportunity, can be witnessed in the centrality of music to black popular culture. Strategically prevented for many years from competing for power in the field of linguistic discourse, blacks focused on music as an alternative mode of expression and opportunity for cultural dominance. This was achieved, Hall argues, only through the costly exercise of “strategic essentialism,” the aesthetic codification of blackness. This strategy successfully created discursive power for blacks as a social group, but ultimately undermined the power of individual blacks by shackling their individual identities to the group identity and offering support for racist ideologies based on essentialist beliefs. Hall questions whether such strategic essentialism is still a valuable tactic, arguing that “it is to the diversity, not the homogeneity, of black experience that we must now give our undivided creative attention” (p. 473).

Hebdige (1987) uses this theoretical framework to explore the rise and spread of reggae as an aesthetic vehicle for grassroots news dissemination, social imagination, and identity construction. Like Hall (1996b), he views cultural expression as an opportunity for social intervention, and music as a site for power confrontations: “the important issues for the [recording] artist have less to do with staying ‘honest’ and ‘authentic’ and refusing to ‘sell out’ than with grabbing and retaining control of the product at every stage and in all its forms” (p. 107).

Like Attali (1985) and Barthes (1977), Hebdige (1987) believes that social ideas can be coded into musical aesthetic information. However, like Hall (1996a; 1996b) and Gross (1995), he emphasizes the importance of communities of shared meaning and shared practice in the transmission of these ideas. One aesthetic strategy Hebdige makes much of is “versioning,” the Jamaican term for innovation based on the musical commons (e.g. adding new vocals to a hit record). Hebdige uses it as a blanket term to represent the spirit of pastiche at the heart of all Afro-diasporic musics. Versioning, he argues, is “a democratic principle because it implies that no one has the final say” (p. 14). In other words, meanings are endlessly recreated and reinterpreted as aesthetic information travels and morphs throughout culture.

Hebdige (1987) traces the voyage of the musical pastiche “cut ‘n’ mix attitude” (p. 141) from a localized Jamaican cultural strategy to New York City, where it became the genesis of hip-hop, a musical form that has now achieved a degree of global cultural dominance. “When taken to its logical conclusion in rap,” he argues, “cut ‘n’ mix suggests that we shouldn’t be so concerned about where a sound comes from. It’s there for everyone to use. And every time a new connection is made between different kinds of music, a new channel of communication opens up” (p. 146).

This strategy of forging cultural alliances by blending aesthetic codes typifies the kind of “anti-essentialist” intervention recommended by Hall (1996b), Frith (1996) and Lipsitz (1994), and described by Rose (1994) and Neal (1999) with regards to hip-hop and in my own research (Sinnreich, 2004) with regards to mash-ups. Ultimately, these theorists argue, such temporary alliances between strategically defined social groups, enacted through music but geared toward social change, can be an engine of aesthetic innovation, a source of political power, and an important generator of shared meanings in the field of popular music.

For many of the theorists I have discussed, music is largely interchangeable with other cultural forms. For Adorno (2002), popular music is simply one of the many soulless products of the culture industry. For Bourdieu (1984), music functions no differently as a marker of social class than do literature or sports. For Hall (1996b), music is simply one of many cultural forms in which disparate groups and individuals may struggle for power. Personally, I tend to disagree with these viewpoints, and side with scholars such as Attali (1985), Frith (1996) and Hebdige (1987), who see music as a unique form of human communication.

One of music’s most important and unique qualities is so obvious, it seems almost trite to mention: it is invisible. Yet, it makes a world of difference. In our ocularcentric culture, which prizes the eyes over the ears (McCann, 2002; Ong, 1982), this invisibility gives musical information the stealth and power of a secret agent, doing its work while hiding in plain sight. Another, similar aspect of music is that (lyrics notwithstanding), it is a prelinguistic form of communication. Hall (1996b) regards this as a form of inferiority, viewing music as a second-rate booby prize for a political bloc barred from linguistic discourse. But, like its invisibility, music’s prelinguistic quality may be also seen as a source of (hidden) strength. It’s very difficult to censor social ideas expressed musically, because it’s nearly impossible to ascribe a literal meaning to it. And even the most rigidly codified meanings (e.g. the linguistic referents of African talking drum patterns, or the religious implications of Baroque harmonies) can be lost entirely once the musical information is disembedded from its original cultural context and imported into a new one (e.g. a “world music” or “classical” radio format).

There are other points on which my own theoretical understanding of music as a social force diverges from and builds upon the readings I have reviewed here. For instance, I am attracted to Attali’s (1985) and Bourdieu’s (1984) political economic treatment of music as a form of “capital,” but I don’t think either of them got the whole story. Attali focuses on music’s capacity to spur social change. Bourdieu focuses on musical knowledge as a form of “cultural capital” that can act as a mark of power. But I think there is another, more elemental quality to music that underlies both of these qualities – namely, its operation at the levels of cognition and psychology. To me, the nervous system (and the “consciousness” that emerges from it) is a very useful bottom line from which to discuss other levels of human activity and experience. From this perspective, music can be understood as neither political capital nor cultural capital, but cognitive capital. I’m fully aware that there’s no objective “bottom line” for the human condition (someone with a physics background could theoretically argue for “quantum capital”), but I find this a practical framework for both qualitative and quantitative analysis.

A final, related issue that I find lacking in most of the literature is an acknowledgment of music as a phenomenological, or somatic, experience. Music isn’t just an abstract form of information that can be communicated independently of its medium (such as quantitative data or raw text) – it’s an event, something that happens to you physically. Most cultural theory avoids this perspective because it is messy – it’s impossible to capture via any known methodology (I am confident that FMRI tells us no more than ethnography can about people’s physical experiences of music), and it suggests a material determinism and physical essentialism that are anathema to contemporary modes of thought.

Yet, it would also be foolish to continue to ignore this aspect of musical communication. A perfect fifth interval sounds meaningful to people in every culture because the rudimentary mathematical relationship of 2:1 operates uniquely on our ears and our aural/perceptive structures. Similarly, a sound repeated at regular intervals feels rhythmic to us because our perception of time is inherently somatic and our lives are dictated by (dare I say circadian?) rhythms. This doesn’t mean that a perfect fifth or a 4/4 time cycle means the same thing in every culture or to every person – obviously, they don’t – but they are universally recognizable as having the capacity to carry meaning, because of their fundamentally distinctive phenomenological qualities.

Clearly, I have not (yet) assembled a grand unifying theory of music and society, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have the space or the time to discuss it in any detail here. But these are the bare bones of my current model as it stands: music as a physical event, bearing a cognitive capital, subject to the imposition of power and offering the capacity for resistance as it travels in the interpersonal communicative and symbolic space we call culture.

References

Adorno, T. W. (2002). On popular music. In R. Leppert (ed.), S. H. Gillespie (trans.), Essays on Music, pp. 437-469. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Adorno & Horkheimer (1972). The Dialectic of the Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder.

Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1977)

Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text (Stephen Heath, Ed. and trans.). New York: Hill

Benjamin, W. (1968). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In Illuminations. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Frith, S. (1996). Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gross, L. (1995). Art and artists on the margins. In L. Gross, ed., On the Margins of Art Worlds.

Hall, S. (1996a). The problem of ideology. In D. Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.

Hall, S. (1996b). What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture? In D. Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.

Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: the meaning of style. New York: Methuen.

Hebdige, D. (1987). Cut 'n' mix: cultural identity and Caribbean music. London: Comedia.

Lipsitz, G. (1994). Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place. London: Verso.

McCann, A. (2002, November) Beyond the term ‘music’. Presented at the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, LA.

Morley, D. (2000). Home Territories: Media, Mobility, and Identity. London: Routledge.

Neal, M. A. (1999). What the music said: Black popular music and Black public culture. New York: Routledge.

Ong, W. (1982). Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge.

Paddison, M. (1982). The critique criticized: Adorno and popular music. Popular Music, 2, 201-218.

Rose, T. (1994). Black noise: rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Sinnreich, A. (2004). Mash it up!: Hearing a new musical form as an aesthetic resistance movement. National Communication Association, Chicago, 2004.

the questions

just received the questions 10 minutes ago. challenging stuff, but i think i can hammer out something halfway coherent over the next 9 days...

Quals Questions for Aram Sinnreich

April 8, 2005

1. Cultural Studies [Sturken]:
        [one of the following]

David Morley writes that the challenge of scholarship in cultural studies is how to theorize the material and this discursive together, and the economic and the cultural together.  What does Morley mean by this?  How will you address this challenge in your own research?

Many cultural studies scholars have focused on music as a particular kind of cultural form through which cultural flows, bricolage, pastiche, incorporation, and cross cultural and cross ethnic appropriations are accomplished.  Examine and distinguish the arguments these scholars have made about music, and make an argument of your own for why music can be distinguished for other cultural forms (or not) at the level of cultural innovation and global cultural migrations.

What does it mean for a scholar such as Raymond Williams to argue that "culture is ordinary"?  What is the genealogy of the concept of the ordinary and the everyday in cultural studies?  Why is an emphasis on the ordinary important to the origins of British cultural studies, and what does such a concept mean in the context of US-based work in cultural studies?

2. Network Society and Communication Policy [Bar & Monge]:

Pick three network theories which have relevance for communication policy,   justifying your selection.  Briefly explicate the core assertions of the   theories and explain why you think they are interesting.  Compare the  implications of these theories for selected communication policies.  Do   these policies take full advantage of the theoretical insights? If not,   what would be the benefits and the drawbacks if current policies were   changed to conform to the theories?

3. Art, Communication and Aesthetic Theory [Gross]:

Adorno and Thomas Frank worry about the commercial increasingly impinging on the space of the public sphere.  The music industry increasingly worries about their commercial music being treated as a public good (p2p, etc).  Maybe a bigger framework would suggest not that either is impinging on the other, but that the categories are becoming less relevant.  After all, commerce is simply a specialized form of social interaction. If we believe Bourdieu that there are other forms of capital (social, cultural), then we can understand new communication media and the resulting social practices as forming the foundation for a society in which every kind of capital is transacted like commodities -- or vice versa, where commodities are undifferentiated from other forms of social relations. How would such a development, or way of thinking, relate to traditional ways of thinking about the arts [traditional at least in the West since the 18^th century or so]? Discuss. awful nice of larry to throw me this bone. he is almost quoting verbatim an email i sent him a few weeks back. hardly a softball question, though. it's a lot easier to posit something like this in a 2-paragraph email than to support it in a 15-page paper.

4. Musicology [Demers]:

[ONE OF THE FOLLOWING]

Question 1:

In Roland Barthes’ Image-Music-Text, he argues that “under the pressure of the mass long-playing record, there seems to be a flattening out of technique.” (189) Explain what Barthes means by “flattening out of technique.” Is he repeating Adorno’s critique of mass produced music, or is there room in Barthes’ cosmology for music that is produced in a standardized fashion but that nonetheless contains the potential for meaning? Finally, is Barthes right?: given home studios and the democratization of music making, can we really speak of a flattening out of technique?

Question 2:

Theodore Gracyk is just one of numerous critics to theorize on the relationship between recordings and “music itself” (however it is defined). Explain Gracyk's defense of the recording as the definitive objet d’art of rock music. Then, propose your own theory on the relationship(s) between recordings and live performances in the light of remix culture.

Question 3:

Song lyrics are generally easy to decipher, but how much (or how little) does the music tell us? Discuss various methodologies used to unpack the non-verbal elements of music. In particular, look at how these strategies attempt to articulate issues of gender/sexuality, race and ethnicity, technology, etc. How successful are these strategies?