Artistic Modernism as Reply to Mass Media

Artistic Modernism as Reply to Mass Media
Frank Zappa versus the Banalifacation of Anniversaries

"1968 & All That" Conference, Conway Hall, London 10-v-2008

Ben Watson & Didier Mervelet

N.B. an audio recording of this meeting will be broadcast on "Late Lunch With Out To Lunch", 2pm Wednesday 21 May 2008, Resonance 104.4FM and www.resonancefm.com

Media

There are many ways to skin a cat. [Didier: improvisation] Likewise, you can evaluate someone's discourse in many ways. An address to a room of interested people is not just a matter of logic and concepts, it's a performance to which everything contributes: clothes, hair, pronunciation, stance and attitude, facial expressions, the way a script is held, untranscribable ums and ahs. In the days when religion and literature were what allowed people to imagine what everyone else was thinking, the word and the book were the material basis of communication. A quote from the Bible, a phrase from Shakespeare or Goethe or Marx, and you'd proved your point. During the course of the twentieth century, the intense technological competition of two world wars produced a new environment, miniaturizing and mass-producing technologies which had previously been the playthings of the rich and eccentric. Radio and television, pulp magazines, porn, the camera, the tape recorder and music on disc allowed masses of people to bypass the written word and experience other people through visual imagery. Previously, experiencing the aura of someone's presence meant that you'd had a chance to catch their eye yourself, to shake their hand - or stab them with a dagger. With photographs and televison and film, you can make snap judgements of people you'd never met. The political consequences of this were far from trivial.
You see film footage of Guevara and Castro walking victoriously into Havana in 1959, and you know immediately you're on their side, not on Kennedy's. They're "cool", they're confident, down with the people. Their smiles are not Madison Avenue, they beam the same beatific populist warmth as Elvis or Bob Marley. But the fact that the Cuban revolution could be contained in one country - and that Castro could contemplate using anti-working-class weapons like nuclear missiles1 - shows that this immediacy requires further reflection. Without the politics to make it permanent, the moment of revolution passed. Russian-style state-capitalism betrayed socialist potential. The non-written immediacy of electronic communication was being added to the armoury of counter-revolutionary commercial and political interests. Cuba between 1959 to 1962 anticipated what happened globally between 1968 and 1974: a failed socialist revolution supplying capitalism with techniques for its renovation.
One response - common on both left and right - was simply to decry these developments, and insist on book-learning as the only true path to authentic knowledge. This has a calming effect, like contemplating a carefully-folded ham sandwich in the library canteen, but it doesn't allow you to understand why - in 1968 - young people all over the world threw cobblestones at the police. That we are bathed in electronic media is a fact, not an option, which is why anyone interested in overthrowing capitalism must take seriously any force which can use them. Notwithstanding recent splits in the London left, it's significant that when critic and broadcaster Michael H. Tencer first saw George Galloway perform - a TV interview - he called him the mosr savvy media operator since Frank Zappa.

Anniversaries

Anniversaries are toxic things. My touchstone for what is good and bad in contemporary society is the late guitarist Derek Bailey, inventor of proletarian atonal modernism in jazz. He called anniversaries "gruesome". When Han Benninck and Misha Mengelberg decided to celebrate thirty years of their Instant Composers' Pool with a series of concerts and the publication of a book, Derek said it was the sort of thing a firm of chartered accountants should do, not improvising musicians. Derek Bailey prefered things like Quid, a magazine of photocopied pages of poetry, polemic and criticism, held together by a single staple. Not that he ever read an entire issue. Just that, noting the earnest density of the writing and the no-budget production values, he hadn't seen anything like it since the 60s. This ability to judge things by look, smell and attitude is disconcerting for anyone who's into Marxism or "theory" - whose speciality is the interpreation of text - but it's still how most people judge things. When canny spirits like Bailey do it, it gives us crucial insights. Nevertheless, Bailey instilled in me such animosity to anniversaries, that when Quid asked me to contribute to a special on Guy Debord, thus marking the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Society of the Spectacle, I shot back an e-mail to Keston Sutherland saying "Keston, anniversaries are just nails in the coffin of unlived time". This got me into a row with Keston that's only just blown over. [Didier: Dérives et Barricades]
So why am I talking to you at this event? The prospect of hearing people with different politics clashing over the "correct" interpretation of a past political upheaval is gruesome too. The past is reduced to ammunition for heavy ordinance trundled in for completely different reasons than curiosity about the past. In their conflicts over interpretations of history, political sects resemble rival imperialisms fighting over some distant country. But even this kind of angsty in-fighting is preferable to what mainstream media do. Anniversaries are perfect for bourgeois journalists. The mechanical apparatus of the calendar - what Walter Brnjamin dissed as "empty, homogenous time" - provides them with an alibi for their lack of commitment to anything at all, a way of rotating historical topics in random order for no discernible purpose other than the usual distracted lack-of-attention required to make us scan the ads. With "1968 and All That", even Andrew Burgin's claim that there are loads of new people who want to hear about 1968 failed to get me motivated.
However, something happened between the invitation and this event involving a tape recording from 1968 which made me change my mind. When he attended the First International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology in 2004, Bruno Le Tohic, technical adviser to Les Fils de l'Invention in Paris, handed me a pile of CD-R downloads of rare Zappa material, mainly recordings of live shows. I didn't listen to them. I'd been addicted to cassette tapes of Zappa live since the 70s when Danny Houston introduced me to an international conspiracy of Zappa fans hungry for unofficial material - bypassing the venal bootleg-LP mafia by swapping audio material directly on tape cassette, with no cash involved. But I couldn't see the point of listening to Bruno's CD-Rs, since if I wanted to, I could download identical audio files anytime I wished. Like a copyright library - or reality itself - cyberspace offers so many opprtunities for investigation, that one's response can be weariness rather than excitement. The limitless horizons of information stun the researcher. What we need is a bullshit detector, a garbage disposal unit, a thread in the labyrinth, a reason to say "no", not yet more "stuff".
Theoretically. But I don't have Broadband, and downloading adds prohibitive amounts to my phone bill. CD-Rs are material objects, and so partake in the chance collisions on a cluttered desk which can lead to flashes of theoretical insight. One evening, I happened to grab Bruno's CD-R of the Mothers of Invention live in Paris on 26 October 1968 - the last date of Zappa's second European tour that year, the evening after his band played the Albert Hall here in London. I stuck it in the CD player. The precise date of the gig isn't listed in Barry Miles's book Zappa - A Visual Documentary, even though it was an important one for France: the first set of the concert was broadcast on French radio, and the second on French television. Zappa tells the audience the concert is being taped, and gets a cheer. He meant this concert to be listened to in the future. You can tell from the trenchancy and flamboyance of the playing that the musicians sense the gig is of world-historic import. Zappa's own rapport with the audience is exceptionally spirited and engaged. In telling them about a kids' TV programme called Captain Kangaroo, he says they're lucky they can't understand English, makes jokes about the horrors of stand-up toilets for American visitors to France, remarking that "German toilet paper is vicious, but your stuff is not so swift either". Fulfilling his role as the contemporary Diogenes, Zappa concludes "May God have mercy on your hole". [Didier's second interpolation : Les Cabinets à la turque] This banter - and the whole tenor of the music - has a completely different resonance from the shows I witnessed in London in 1979. In 1968, Zappa, one of the most musically keen and critical minds of his generation, is the toast of a collective esprit which is perfect for music: sexually liberated, totally amused by the non-standardised, desirous of improvisation and deviation, and in complete contempt of firstworld governments waging war in Vietnam. Listening to this tape recording made me want to talk about the meaning of 1968 in a way no history book or political argument could. The glory of Hendrix and Coltrane is really the glory of their audiences, but it's often hard to hear past the genius bullshit of legacy marketing to that fact: Zappa's scatological debunking does that for you.

Did Zappa "sell out"?

It's not that I think that by 1979 - or 1988 - Zappa had "sold-out" or "gone rubbish", he was still doing what he could with the materials to hand. Rock writers who admire the Mothers of Invention and diss Zappa's later music - frequently lumping them with the Beatles, Grateful Dead and Velvet Underground into some vague "spirit of the 60s" genre which every naff rock group promoted by the NME has imitated to death ever since - these socalled critics are just sucking the cock of a corpse. Their craven collusion with the commodification of rebellion knows nothing about the critique of current conditions. But what was going on at this gig? It's as if Adrian Leverkühn, the character modelled after Theodor Adorno in Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus, had successfully created the music he proposes in a famous passage (p. 310), successfully introducing a mass audience to advanced modern music. Zappa's music appears as a natural expression of collective belief in radical social transformation. Revolutionary times link the alienated genius to genuine audiences - because they are becoming genuiuses themselves.
In the 60s, the critic Leroi Jones talked about how the saxophonist should be assessed, less for his adherence to the chord changes, than for his "stance vis à vis the social totality". In 1976, Malcolm McLaren said that the kids weren't buying Sex Pistols records for the music, but for the "attitude". This is the same thing, and it's how the Bolshevik linguist Valentin Volosinov says we should understand words: not as a code made of letters, but as utterances of social import. The music of John Coltrane and the Sex Pistols cannot be understood without adopting their revolutionary attitude towards bourgeois adminsitrered society. However, because this "attitude" reaches people and speaks to their innermost desires and frustrations, it's also the perfect sauce for commodities aimed at adolescent youth. The term "attitude" used by bogus experts on popular culture - an undifferentiated quality like "talented" or "cool" - simply means "saleable", as empty and abstract as money itself . Such "'Tude" is the opposite of art, which dramatizes our own relationship to the social totality, and provides a glimpse of what an unalienated, socialised collective might achieve. As the 70s and 80s and 90s unfolded, Zappa made stylistic twists and turns in order to keep providing an antidote to niche-marketed identity-formation. Identity thinking allows capital to dominate consumers - just as imperialism dominates third-world politics - by setting tribes against each other.

Revolutionary Politics is not "Politics"

What I'm trying to explain to you is the revolutionary nature of the upset in subject-object relations made in May '68 in Paris, and how attempts to force revolution back into the straitjacket of official "politics" travesty its actuality and appeal. Why do Didier and I choose to celebrate Zappa rather than the MC5 or Sun Ra or Hendrix? I've been accused of simply sticking to some adolescent fixation, a divisive tic which goes against the socialist demand for solidarity.2 I call what Zappa does "art" because it engages directly with subjective desires and intutive drives beneath the zone of conceptual logic - people who like Zappa like his sequences of composed notes and the timbral abutments and sonic surprises of his records. His popularity in continental Europe and the old Soviet bloc is all to do with the fact that his records work musically - Beethoven reengineered for music-on-disc rather than the printed score. You don't require command of the English language to appreciate Zappa. However, Zappa's music has nothing to do with "art" in the sense of the creation of singleton or limited-edition objects for people with spare cash to invest in. Indeed, like R. Crumb, Zappa abominates the art world. Zappa is a nemesis for queasy quasi-radicals like Art & Language and their contemporary progeny, who think that being bought by the museums and collectors and thus "recuperated" is something to boast about. These artworld showmen know what Debord said, but seek to justify themselves anyway. In practice, their bad conscience and tongue-in-cheek mincing immediately sabotage the untrammelled, unapologetic vehemence which is the imago of great art.

Why I'm Not Saying the Usual Postmodernist Bilge

Has anyone seen the exhibition Breaking the Rules at the British Library on Euston Road? Is it still on? If so, go. It's free, and there's a fascinating Kurt Schwitters collage to look at. But don't swallow the agenda of the organisers. They say that the explosion of modernist art movements at the start of the twentieth century - Futurism, Vorticism, Dada, Surrealism - was a response to the crisis introduced by the new electronic media. As if world war and social revolution had nothing to do with it! According to the BL organisers, at the start of the twentieth century, newspapers, magazines and radio made book culture redundant, ushering in a new epoch. So these modernist outbursts were the equivalent of The Who wrecking their amplifiers: there was nowhere left to go. This might sound similar to the argument I've sketched here about new electronic media, but it's actually the opposite. The BL position depoliticises the avantgarde, adopting a stageist view of history which ultimately derives from Stalin: the conflictual dynamics of actual societies flattened out into a bland succession of chronological periods. For the BL organisers, novels are replaced by radio, then television and then presumably myspace, all of them singing the same deadly chorus of individualism and competition, privacy and separation, topdown government and unapproachable science. The twentieth century certainly immersed us in electronic media, but this did not reconcile or supersede the conflict between labour and capital or vanquish our alienation. The avantgardes of the early twentieth century anticipated new social formations which would replace bourgeois society, and prepared new, more immediate forms of art to greet them; when, due to the failure of the German revolution, the new social formations failed to conquer the old, this artistic modernism became a plaything for millionaires and eccentrics and the CIA. That is the story of the post-war avantgarde, a pitiful game of self-cancellation.
However, these things work dialectically. In the sphere of mass-mediated society - as opposed to the artworld - artistic modernism is critical and revolutionary, which is why Zappa has a social relevance for subjectivities battered and bruised by capitalist alienation, whereas Marcel Duchamp and John Cage do not. The curators of public culture cannot understand Zappa because his below-the-belt appeal to mass instincts destroys culture as a regime of distinction, inducing instead an intoxicating revelation - a belly laugh, a quasi-physical spasm of release - concerning the emperor's new clothes. In 1968, Zappa didn't go along with the revolutionary students at the LSE or at the Free University of Berlin, he distrusted them as products of higher educations, out of touch with the subverbal truths of appetite, sex and music. I wouldn't underwritre all his pronouncements from the 60s - some were strangely like those of Theodor Adorno when admonishing the New Left - but Zappa is part of the discussion, and a revolutionary movement without the contribution of Zappa's music and the Zappologists would be prey to all kinds of book-based delusions. His polemical version of black American music states that authentic subjectivity is critical and revolutionary, that your private revulsion to being engineered by the mass media is valid, worth taking as a plan of action and revolt. Without that assurance, what's the point of activism and vote-catching? As Bob Dobbs showed on his recent visit to London, the key to understanding modern media can actually be found in a book, namely Finnegans Wake.
In common with all official culture, the British Library exhibition underwrites the success stories of the contemporary world - television replaced the book - thereby making its own contribution completely otiose. Why have a library exhibition which tells the same tale as all the mass media, except to give a select few the thrill of cultural distinction (and an even selecter few a few glasses of champagne at the launch)? As Trotsky pointed out, a hymn to the dirigable can be written with half a pencil on the back of an envelope. What we want is someone to tell us what's being done to us: Ulli Freer's poetry, not another TV show. Situationist slogans! [Didier's third interpolation : Cette insurrection qui vient] Situationist slogans appeared all over Paris in May 1968, not because they'd been written on TV screens - Coca Cola was already doing that - but because they'd been hatched by a collective reading Marx and Freud and acting on what it had learned, working out what TV screens were doing to their life and minds and sex lives. The apparent primitivism of grafitti distracts from the stunning advance and sophistication of its central premiss: that poetry only means something if it tells everybody about themselves. If we can evacuate culture of all fetishisms of distinction and work on the unvalued level of immediacy,we may be able to rediscover the revolutionary power of collective thinking, radically democratic and impatient of all separations. The left agitator who looks longingly at the "influence" of Madonna or Sting has forgotten the vast territories of him or herself which are unroused by the optical surface of alienation. Anything, however denigrated or overlooked, which rouses this part of ourselves deserves immediate - and passionate - attention. Which is why we wanted to talk to you about Frank Zappa, folks.
Conclusion: Didier & Ben talk through a free translation of the final page of L'insurrection qui vient by Comité Invisible (Paris, La Fabrique éditions, 2007): On the metro, you no longer encounter the pall of embarassment which usually screens off the gestures of commuters. Unknowns talk to each other, they aren't sunk into themselves. Bigger crowds gather on the boulevards, discussing earnestly. Actions are being taken all over town. Another barracks has been ransacked and put to the torch. In a sudden flash of lucidity - realising the ghastly crimes committed by a system dedicated to profits - a manager has just shot dead a bunch of his colleagues. Wall posters go up containing the home addresses of all the police top brass and of all the prison officers, causing an unprecedented flight from posh housing: squatters' delight! We take the excess of our production to the old local grocery-cum-bar, and pick up what we need. We also go there to discuss the general situation and the parts needed in the mechanical workshop. The radio keeps insurgents informed of the recall of government forces. A rocket has just taken out the main wall of the Clairvaux prison. It's impossible to tell whether it's months or years since the "events" [les événements - according to Didier, this untranslatable word was used by the French media to avoid naming native resistance and revolution in Algeria; in May '68 - with a ironic twist Valentin Volosinov would've appreciated - it was used by occupiers and rioters to describe their own actions] started happening. The prime minister, with his appeals for calm, seems to be on his own.