10 Membranes

Music critics need to read Pierre Bourdieu

A new critical commonplace is occurring in music. And to paraphrase Run DMC, it goes a little something like this: contemporary music is dead; it has lost all sense of originality and differentiation, and simply recycles the sounds, styles and motifs of previous generations. It is hence devoid of true artistic merit, atemporal, decontextualised and lacking when compared to the musical innovations of, say, 1979 or 1993.  Modern music, the argument goes, is utterly empty, pointless, innane.

This view has been espoused by Simon Reynolds in Wired magazine, Jaron Lanier in his book You Are Not A Gadget and Dan Barrow on The Quietus amongst others.

This view is not only absurd, but actively embarrassing for those holding it.

It is absurd because untrue, and rather naive, embarrassing because all these writers have essentially taken the conservative Establishment position that they would no doubt define themselves against. They would, I suspect, align themselves on the side of progress, innovation and the avant-garde, yet they have become the custodians of an old tradition, scoffing at the new comers who just don’t get it, with their bad and vulgar taste. They are the same as all those nay-sayers who hated Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, The Sex Pistols etc etc. They are the boring old men for whom it was perpetually better in their day. They are the hoarders of economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital desperately fending off the barbarians at the gate who have a vested interest in clawing that to themselves.

As with so many things, when you put it like that, it becomes clear they haven’t been reading French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. If they had things would be so much clearer.

There are two arguments from Bourdieu relevant to this case. Some background: Bourdieu sees society as being made up of interlinking fields, each of which to a certain extent obeys its own logic, with actors in those fields taking positions to gain capital, defined loosely, according to that logic of the field.  Culture generally is one such field and has a number of interesting characteristics that set it apart from most others fields.

Argument one:  within the cultural field there is a polarization between commercial culture on the one hand and avant garde culture on the other. Commercial culture is that which very closely ties in to the project of accumulating of economic capital, and thus its modes are always very much adapted to an audience, that is, they attempt to anticipate popular demand, and so tend towards orthodoxy and conservatism in their style, and short-termism in their outlook. On the other hand avant-garde culture is distinguished by an unusual autonomy from the demands of economic capital, instead it is deployed to gain symbolic capital (recognition) from a small group of fellow producers and critics who ascribe its value, realised monetarily only later down the line after it has accumulated enough symbolic capital that it has a position of some dominance within the cultural field. Not made for a pre-existing audience, this culture requires that an audience be made for it, even as that audience “produces” it by recognising it as a legitimate new cultural form. According to the logic of this area, the less a work partakes of the commercial realm the better, and hence within the avant garde there is always a tendency towards more pure (self referential and abstract) works.

Critics are mixing up commercial and avant garde culture, or rather, they are judging the legitimacy of the popular culture by terms in which it doesn’t – and never has – judged itself, thus missing the point. Commercial culture has never been particularly innovative, and always recycles itself, because of its underlying homology with the economic logic at work in society, and its connections to the dominant culture of the day. This was a true in the 1880s, as it was in the 1980s as it was in the 2000s. This is not to say it doesn’t change, just to say that by its very rationale for existence it is more prone to producing the easy, banal and familiar. Criticising contemporary music for this is baseless, without purpose and is not especially true of now more than any other time in history.

Argument two: the dialectic at work within the avant garde field itself is also instructive. Let’s pretend that the critique of music is just directed at those works which would fit into the avant garde, that is, are oriented more towards the accumulation of social and symbolic capital than economic capital. All fields are composed of position-takings of actors, who take positions according to their judgement of which out of the options available to them within the prescribed boundaries of the field will be most advantageous in terms of the field. The history of the avant garde is hence a history of position and counter position takings, which work as a dialectic of new extremes to “out avant garde” the last generation, and by doing so accrue symbolic capital as recognised by peers, a move which will always rile the older and once avant garde generation as it undermines the dominant position they have. The result of this series of moves is that each position-taking is inscribed with a history of the field, of all the previous position takings, as a position taking is always taken in reference to something else. Bourdieu argues that even if one were to produce an identical work but several generations down from the “original” that intervening history imbues the new work with meanings wholly unheard of before. There is no simple repetition, no straightforward recycling, unoriginality or return to the past. Each work contains the revolutions of the past within it, and so goes beyond them, even as there is an inter-generational struggle for legitimacy as artists seek the accumulation of symbolic capital.

This has two implications for those arguing that modern music is boring and unoriginal. Firstly they have totally misunderstood the functioning of the cultural field, and how returns to the past are always impossible, and are always actually steps forward. They are always inflected by, comment on and transform that which went before. They exist in dialogue with the past yet also supercede it. Arguing for blandness and unoriginality, saying that new sounds are not occurring, is a futile argument, as it is in the nature of how culture advances that old sounds will always be recombined, and progression always contains within the complete sum of all the previous moves.

Secondly it is quite clear that they are now in the position of being the older generation, people with a stake in what has already been, who are now trying to de-legitimise new forms of music that exist outside their domain. This is a move that has been done countless times throughout history, indeed, has been done every time there is newness of some kind, which is every generation. The sad thing here is that a) these lot still, inevitably, try to co-opt the position of the legitimate avant garde when they are the opposite and b) they think they are very knowing and superior and cool, but they aren’t.

They’re just old fuddy duddies, old washed up rockers and ravers who’ve got old and don’t understand modern music and don’t really understand the operations of culture within society. Yesterday I listened to two bands I hadn’t heard before: Ghostpoet and Bring Me To The Horizon. Very different music styles but both defiantly of the moment. They couldn’t have been made in any other age but this one, and if people don’t like that they should retreat to their bedrooms and listen to Joy Division (Full Disclosure: I do this to).