Pop music, as understood in this dissertation, is a creation of mass production. The context created by the means of its dissemination ensures that its development is predicated, generally and specifically, on the extent and potential of its appeal. What gives it its dynamism is the way in which it is used by its audience, and the manifold ways in which it might be used. On the one hand, this is an example of how capitalism tends towards standardization and cynical exploitation; one Pop music can be sold to many people. On the other hand, mass production of Pop music makes its development unpredictable; there is no ‘true’ interpretation of a mass product, as there is no standard context for its reception. This is what makes Pop music an interesting topic of study. The extension of mass production into the sphere of leisure/‘culture’ is seen as a manifestation of what is, after Marx, referred to as the transition from the ‘formal’ to the ‘real’ domination of capital. For Jacques Camatte, capital is “in constant movement; it capitalizes everything, assimilates everything and makes it its own substance.” And for Louis Dupre, “the recent extension of the capitalist principle to all spheres of existence has unquestionably been a major factor in the reification of modern culture.” Without necessarily contesting this viewpoint, I would be wary of any attempt to denigrate the potential of human agency. In the last years of his life, Karl Marx plunged himself into anthropological study, the incomplete results of which are to be found in his Ethnological Notebooks. Marx studied the development of distinction and hierarchy, a study legitimated in his eyes by a belief that modern man contained an “archaic communal component.” The intrusion of the objective into the subjective is never total; in a world of struggles, what is liberatory in Pop music might be politicised in opposition to the ideological constructions that mystify it. So by problematising pleasure, capitalism also expands the realm in which its contradictions operate. In the struggle to enjoy ourselves in this world, our Pop practice becomes one more way in which we actively contest the ‘rules’ laid out by capitalist ideology. In the clusters of creative tension that concretise themselves around contradiction, we are given a further glimpse into the transformative potential that resides within us. That Pop music emerged as a distinct subsection of ‘culture’, to be further divided and distinguished, is not a direct consequence of capitalism alone. Distinction and division have ancient roots, from which manifold struggles have grown; these have multiplied themselves across the ages, now resolved, now sharpened, both by a momentum that are their own (i.e. created by the distinction) and also by their shifting context. What is different about the analysis of a capitalist product of recent times (Pop) is that such divisive concepts as ‘high and ‘low’ culture, demonstrably contradict the essence of the product itself. While Pop music might be created by a production process that has evolved in a manner appropriate to the capitalist system, its logic embedded within it rather than external to it, the key to its supersession remains identifiable in the social basis of its production. Because Pop music is dependent upon miscegenation, plagiarism and collective and individual imaginations it threatens to destabilise the ideologies that seek to mystify this reality. Even though it is through the momentum of capitalism’s evolution that the aforementioned concept of ‘high’ culture has been rendered obsolete, it remains useful as justification for and mystification of the ultimate divisions that form the basis of class society, between subject and object, between human beings and what they produce. The philosophical/ideological link between this primary division and the constructed mystification of Pop music lies in dualism; what Marx referred to as “the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism…that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.” The commodity system relies upon the equality of things; their reducibility to money, to bought labour. However, the ideology that justifies the tyranny of things over workers cannot acknowledge this principle; it needs to impose a hierarchy upon things as it does upon people. Without challenging the basis of its own existence, it does this through mystifying the production process; through ‘genius’, for example; taking the commodity out of its social base and enshrining it in ideological ‘cultural categories.’ And so ‘defective’ materialism ends in the cul de sac of mysticism. Marx countered this defect (via idealism) by recognising that our relationship to the world is contingent upon our own actions; that we change the world, and our relationship to it, through praxis. In terms of the politicisation of Pop music, this praxis involves the sharpening of contradictions between a one-sided ideology and a multi-faceted production process. In John Berger’s words, “the means of reproduction are used politically and commercially to disguise or deny what their existence makes possible. But sometimes individuals use them differently.” For example, the process of cross-fertilisation that characterises the history of Pop, and the confusion of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural boundaries.
Tags: Anthropological Notebooks, Formal Real Domination of Capital, Jacques Camatte, John Berger, Karl Marx, Louis Dupre, Pop Music
