by Dave Maier
Here's one way this defense might go. One critic, Nick Smith, appeals to Theodor Adorno’s views here, which looks funny at first, as Adorno is famously all about the high art, as pointedly opposed to anti-artistic hipster trendiness. But let's let Smith explain this paradox to us, and then see what we think.
That sounds bad; but it gets worse.
Things fare no better in the realm of art. Just as in the case of reason, the tyranny of exchange-value has permeated the very structure of aesthetic experience. Kant had argued that art’s defining virtue was its “purposiveness without specific purpose,” and Adorno sees art's resulting independence from conceptual understanding as a possible way to resist the cultural hegemony of identity thinking. In its stubborn individuality, art may stand as a concrete example of life beyond contemporary commodity culture, and as a symbol of reason beyond instrumentality and conceptuality. Unfortunately, as Adorno recognizes, this role for art is futile from the beginning. First, there is an irresolvable tension in using art as a tool to combat instrumental rationality. Similarly, even to the extent that it succeeds, art is in constant danger of succumbing to its own success, which commodifies it and subjects it to the same concept of exchange-value that it was its cultural task to overcome. (For a bitterly cynical examination of this process, see Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool and Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland, ed., Commodify Your Dissent.)
Finally, it is only the enlightened avant-garde edge of art which has realized this cultural mandate in its artistic form; and in doing so, it becomes invisible to society, which prefers the mindless conformity of “commodity fetishism” as purveyed by the culture industry. This is for several reasons; first, due to the degeneration of language and thought in its enslavement to instrumental rationality by consumerist ideology, the oppressed masses are incapable of realizing that what they regard as meaningful is in fact simply repeating back to them the same ideology which keeps them oppressed. (This sounds remarkably patronizing to my ear – as does Thomas Frank for that matter, at least in parts – but let's press on.) Secondly, the conventions of art as well have become degraded due to the ocean of worthless art-product which simply recycles them over and over. Third, even when individuality is seen as a virtue in art, the culture industry manages to divert it into trivial forms, pointless variations on the same empty themes. All that art, even the best art, can do is to mourn the loss of meaning to those who are capable of mourning with it (that's us), and to dramatize the current desperate situation in the vain hope of shocking the rest of us out of our complacency and complicity with the system.
In discussing contemporary Japanese noise, Smith (in an unpublished MS, so you'll have to take my word for it) updates this pessimistic picture and gives it a new twist. Adorno had famously championed the cause of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositions, and just as famously deplored jazz, pop and dance music in all its forms. Since then, popular music of all kinds has taken over the cultural stage, and Schoenberg’s heirs, carefully guarding their formal purity, have simply been swept aside (= no-one listens to that stuff anyway). If there is to be effective resistance to the pop-cultural juggernaut, it must be sought in a different place. Smith locates the contemporary battlefront at the interface of music and noise. For Smith, noise (“from the Latin nausea, suggest[ing] an unpleasant disturbance, confusion, or interference baldly lacking any musical quality”) is the universal solvent of musical structure: undifferentiated and thus uncategorizable, it serves as the ideally unassimilable bastion of irrationality against encroaching conceptualism, just as its barely tolerable “aural agitation” provides the ultimate anti-commodity.
On Smith’s interpretation, the lesson of Japanese noise is thus: desperate times call for desperate measures. And yet even these measures are insufficient, for reasons we have already seen. It is partly because every hint of individuality in art is immediately snatched up by the culture industry for purposes of commodification that it takes a truly repellent cacophony to resist it. But when even this resistance is commodified, art will have no place to turn. This is what Smith sees happening to noise: the very qualities of noise which artists like Boredoms utilize to make it unassimilable are now being touted as those which make it desirable as a commodity. Smith’s disheartening prediction: “The atrophication of music will not end with noise, for even as the ear grows accustomed to its ways, it [loses] its harrowing effect. Even what now seems to be the conclusion of music, anti-music, will itself be reproduced and formalized until the material dies entirely within its shell. All music, and all art, eventually becomes, if it is not already at its inception, a parody of itself…. [W]hen art’s failures become its most effective advertisement, then the critical import of art may be at an end.”
Like Adorno – on Smith's interpretation, anyway – Smith seems to assume that only in total subversion of traditional aesthetic standards can the virtuous resistance to commercial culture take its (here regrettably final) stand, and that every other kind of music (except perhaps those few dogged academic serialists?) is fatally complicit with ruling-class ideology and thus aesthetically worthless (and vice versa). Further, he takes it as axiomatic that noise is essentially unappreciable aesthetically, even as he finds a cultural use for that very aspect of it. Third, he makes the empirical assumption that Japanese noise as a genre is characterized by this attitude toward noise and its aesthetic potential, and can thus be explained completely using his particular examples. None of these assumptions is true.
Unlike atonal music, though, noise, for Smith, is essentially non-musical. On this view, even if noise can be appreciated enough to be commodified, as a sleep aid for example, it cannot convey artistic meaning, as it constitutes meaning's absolute negation. It can thus neither serve as an artistic realm of its own nor help extend that of tonal music beyond the reach of pop-culture (enough, that is, to allow real art to be made). Smith’s picture is much more pessimistic than Adorno’s, essentially conceding defeat by the forces of consumerism. However, his conception of the aesthetic significance of noise is neither sufficient as it stands nor shared by all noise artists.
For the majority of listeners who are slaves to rhythm and melody … the immediate reaction … will probably be discomfort when confronted with the overpowering, apparently unstructured sandstorm blast of his brutal, crushing noise…. When the listener has attuned his or her hearing perspective, what comes out of the Merzbow ‘scream inside the machine’ sound is a thing of beauty that borders on bliss…. [A]fter prolonged listening … a strange kind of calm [descends] as another sound dimension aperture slowly opens up.
López calls his conception of sound “Schaefferian,” after musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, and claims that Schaeffer’s conception of “sound matter” as conceptually distinct from its cause (and thereby freed from referential ties to the world) is “among the most … revolutionary developments in the history of music.”
We might elaborate the suggestion that noise qua noise can be meaningful if listened to properly in either of two ways. The first is that Schaefferian sound art and tonal art (tonal or atonal music) are distinct artforms. This would seem to do no great damage to Adorno’s aesthetic theory; if it is purely general, then it should apply to all art forms, new or old. Indeed, given Adorno’s enthusiasm for a previous “revolutionary development” in music, equally free from stale tonal conventions, this might seem an attractive option. However, it puts inappropriate a priori constraints on the interaction of noise and tone in a single work. Even if noise is not anti-music but merely non-music, the two can only coexist as oil and water, and that just doesn't make sense given the last 50 years of electronic and ambient music.
Perhaps, as López suggests, we should instead distinguish not between types of sound objects (each with their own appropriate way of listening), but between the ways of listening themselves. On each version of the distinction, aesthetic dislocation comes from trying to bring an individual sound object under two or more seemingly incompatible sets of aesthetic conventions at the same time. On the latter view, however, the possibility is left open that a set of sounds can be comprehensible, if not easily so, as either sort of listening experience. After we become accustomed to the necessity of listening in more than one way at once, this experience itself becomes a single, expanded way of listening. Such expansion results in greatly expanded possibilities for the pointed disruption of interpretations-in-progress. Our concepts need not be overwhelmed by an object for dislocation to occur, but simply eluded, if this can be made to happen in an appropriately subtle way – and thus by sounds potentially quite unlike those made by that unfortunate cat with his tail in the blender.
That is, of course, if “dislocation” is what art is or should be aiming for in the first place. We might very well reject Adorno’s guiding assumption that conceptual thought is inherently pernicious, essentially complicit in the doomed Enlightenment project of capturing the world and its irreducibly individual inhabitants in a single web of concepts and laws. Or (risking “commodity fetishism,” oh noes!) we might simply want some awesome new sounds for our stereo. I have to stop now, but re: the latter possibility, you may want to click here and here and definitely here.