Deproduction

(An essay from the future)

The years 1950 to 2100 stand as the great era of Popular Music. It looked for all the world, at a time in the middle of that period, that the various ages of Western music were over (Baroque, Classical, Romantic etc.), that the idea that there could be just a few nameable composers as in previous eras had dissipated forever into the vast distributed collaboration of the pop project where the writers in their millions and the songs in their billions, all available to be pulled from the clouds by anyone in the world, and on other worlds at any time (on Mars at least by that point), replaced the individual composer. Genius replaced by Scenius in the acknowledgement of all the contributors. It had seemed that mass communication and distribution had ended the possibility of there ever being observable periods of anything ever again, so disparate and sprawling the world of music had become that finding the lines that would allow the pop object to be identified looked almost impossible. But looking back on it from a distance it had much the same characteristics as other periods of music before it, a creative epoch that exploded, blossomed over a hundred years or so and then slowed into a long tail whilst creativity found somewhere else to feed and grow. The great production period of popular music was over by the end of its century and a half. Many more decades (centuries even) after that, after the ‘long tail’, the music was still there, all music was there now waiting to be (re)discovered but not to be created. Not anymore. Following the age of pop there had been a deceleration, a diminuendo, a process of deproduction in which the act and art of production was being erased towards a point where the term itself fell into the archive, used only on occasions in quizzes where contestants had to guess what this archaic term once meant.

The age of pop was aware that in opening up the means of production to just about anyone who could afford the technology, production would increase on an exponential scale leading up to the point where the technology would take over production and produce everything. Back at the start of the 21st century Nicholas Bourriaud wrote that “in our daily lives, the gap that separates production and consumption narrows each day” (2007, p39). He borrowed the term ‘postproduction’ from the music and film industries and applied it to art in general where the ready-mades were the building blocks of art for a generation where recycling was not merely a late postmodernist mantra but a worldwide necessity. Bourriaud’s postproduction was still production, but production with an awareness of the always-alreadycontained within it. But what was eventually to come may have been more disturbing to the pop generations whose identity wrapped itself in the clothing of its music and its artists. Devices, guided by bio and neural feedback, applied the ‘right’ music to the user that would produce a desired affect. Like a drug, it was no longer a choice that one would like the given music but a certainty. The choice not to use these devices was an option, an option some considered as a route to an authentic self (just as the pop age had done in its early stages), whilst others did not feel that need (just as those in the later stages of the pop age had done). The sharing of music was more problematic, finding the optimal affect for everyone in the group meant that any one individual’s affect was not optimal for them. Most devices had an option which allowed individuals in the group to seemingly enjoy a shared experience whilst each was fed something unique to them, allowing them to feel the same level of affect if not the same music. People were then curious as to what others were experiencing and so they could plug in to someone else to get their experience as well as their own. That was fun, it was an insight into what moved others and was a great conversation starter. All music was already in existence but these particular devices tended to ‘re-’create music that already existed, not even needing to access the already-there but just creating the already created again (pragmatically this was easier to do than accessing the existing). The ‘great copyright fight’ that followed the age of pop had long since passed and so was not an issue for anyone anymore, and the absolute deterritorialization of production was complete by this point. But with the impossibility of knowing all that existed, discovering again was as good as creating for those that had the impulse to do so. As is often the case, children’s stories carry with them a profound truth disguised in naive clothing, and a centuries old story by A.A. Milne of a boy and a bear started with a cute and curious creative conundrum of the boy pulling his teddy bear down the stairs:

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't."

If he could stop for a moment then the creative problem-solving bear might come up with the solution that walking down stairs would be a better way of getting from top to bottom. That, of course, is the joke of the situation. Walking down stairs already exists, but he hasn’t figured that out yet even though we, the onlooker, know this. And so it became with music once the processes of deproduction were complete. But rediscovering was only one way to access the existing music, just as the idea of walking down stairs was, back then, the common way to descend. Creativity is viewed differently now to then, that’s all. Everyone, every musicker at least, could now be seen to be in the position of permanently ‘head bumping’, searching to find the already-there. There is still talk occasionally of an impending wipeout, an erasure of all music. Perhaps that is what is needed, a clean sheet, a tabula rasa but one that has no awareness of a pre-existence, then everything could be new, be created rather than recreated. And it would be no real loss, Beethoven won’t know or care that neither he nor his symphonies effectively never existed, and neither would anyone else.

Deproduction was the collective, coproduced, end of the art of production. This was nothing new, art has always ended. Back as far ago as Hegel’s lectures on Aesthetics in Berlin in the 1820s he spoke extensively on the subject of ‘the end of art’ and this ‘end’ took several forms. In one form it veered towards purpose, as in ‘to what end’ is the activity undertaken when the artist borrows from nature or from the senses, “what the interest or the End is which man proposes to himself when he reproduces such a content in the form of works of art” (Hegel 1993, p.46). It could, to Hegel, be as simple as an end in itself for mere entertainment, but that was not a concern of much interest to him, a bit more important was whether it might have a moral impulse, but even more than that was that art was a way that the idea, god-like and self-obsessed, could come to know itself. Did the cave dwelling bison painter have a different purpose to their art other than to have a bison in the cave in the absence of a real one? That is perhaps different to the start of music recording where it was about having the music in the room in the absence of the musicians (deus ex machina through the phonograph in Eisenberg’s view). Or so we presumed; who is to say that the cave dweller wanted the same end to their art, that is, to replace the absent bison as best as they could? And besides, bison are big and smelly and take up room, so a painting is better in many ways, hardly a case of “superfluous labour falling short of nature” as Hegel would have it. And who really wants the actual musician in the room? That would just be awkward, one would have to make them a cup of tea and engage in small talk about the weather and ask what they are going to do with the rest of their day and whether they wanted a lift (and please say ‘no’). The phonograph presented no such demands or dilemmas, and the bison painting required no mucking out. Perhaps this mimeticism was ‘more than’ rather than ‘less than’ in relation to the thing itself on a fundamentally pragmatic level. Art for Hegel had the possibility as being an end in itself rather than just being instrumentalised for another purpose but that its part was to move the idea towards self-actualization, and if art is an instrument with an end outside itself then there may be other ways to get to that end which may dispense with art (which is why it had ended). Given that the absolute idea makes art manifest in sensuous form in order to come to know itself then it is no longer needed once that job is complete or is better fulfilled by another tool such as philosophy or religion. The pantheon of arts of Ancient Greece - architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry - could move towards self-realisation, but after that, where philosophy and religion could progress, “Art, by contrast, cannot reach such a climax, but peters out in reflection and irony” (Woods in Hegel 1993, p.xxxi). Art then, in Hegel’s time (and according to Hegel) was already in decline, its deproduction in progress and its long tail on an inevitable journey forever thinning as it goes. At least, as far he could see at the time. It might be possible, in an unknown yet-to-come, that it may have an end ‘again’ placed in its future, an opportunity to be becoming once more, and, as we had grown used to, endings can be annulled. And it was 150 years or so after Hegel’s lectures before art ended again having contemplated ‘art after the end of art.’ But art after the end of art is different to art after the end of production. Music, in Hegel’s time of realising the Romantic idea, “liberates the ideal content from its immersion in matter ...[and] finds utterance for the heart with its whole gamut of feelings and passion” (1993, p95). To know how we feel, we need to have feelings. And Hegel leaves no doubt as to the instrumentalisation of art at the end of his lectures:

And, therefore, what the particular arts realise in individual works of art are according to their abstract conception simply the universal types which constitute the self-unfolding Idea of beauty. It is the external realisation of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is being erected, whose architect and builder is the spirit of beauty as it awakens to self-knowledge, and to complete which the history of the world will need its evolution of ages.

(1993, p.97)

Art, already past its ancient glory, still processes through ages. Eva Guelen in Hegel Without End, wrote that “Whatever beautiful art is, it perishes and dissolves between birth and rebirth. The end of art is the process of art, and it passes not from art to philosophy (or vice versa) but passes away between art and philosophy” (2006, p22). After the classical art of ancient Greece where “the possibilities of art are completed, and by the same token, exhausted. Almost everything in this relation depends upon the concept of ‘recollection’” (2006, p23). Art after the end of art is art before its end again, it is ‘re’-art, “rediscovery, recognition, and rebirth”, the past contained, sublated, in the present.

The pop age, driven by its explosion of technological production and dissemination, allowed the Idea of beauty to come to know itself in the vast oneness of its seemingly billions of songs, rather than its evolution of singular symphonies. But the Idea was at odds with the concept of the singularity of ‘The Song of a Thousand Songs’. Hegel had an Idea, Toast on the other hand, had no Idea. If reduced to the ‘simple’ then Toast simply was without need of an absolute, without an inaccessible being needing self-knowledge. Hegel’s beauty is so ‘needy’, does it really need so many songs, so many art works, about itself? Perhaps that’s where the classical tale and images of Narcissus denote that period as being the end of art, beauty finally looking at itself in a moment of self-satisfied contemplation of its own perfection and completion. A moment of self-consumption; the very thing pop’s future was supposed to have held (it had been prophesied). As much as the Deleuzoguattarian exposing of continuity over separation of the songs held for both with regard to the repositioning (or denial) of the individual underneath, the latter was not a simple revealing of universal types but rather the revealing of the plane of consistency by tearing off the markers of segmentation. Sally Macarthur wrote of the Deleuzian position “When the sonic object opens to the plane of immanence the sonic object fades. The distinction between the listener and the sound object, the listener and the hearer, and listening and vision vanish” (Macarthur, Lockhead and Shaw 2019, p176).

There was concern, in the age of pop, that the accessible technology for production and dissemination homogenised users into pseudo-individualisation through micro-differentiations (Adorno had thought so), which was nothing beyond worthless reflections of a universal form, and it was true that monetization in the milieu was hard (the streams pouring from the clouds brought little money with them). The Idea could take nothing from it, and whereas it may have gained something of use from the art of recording that had come long after the art of ancient Greece (recording being a nugget of knowledge found in the grits of the long tail), there was nothing of value left once deproduction had set in. And the devices that came later (the ones with the guaranteed affect) were fought against by those threatened by the erosion of self, but their defense was relatively short lived. Again, the Idea was not impressed, through the law of diminishing returns it had decided it was no longer worth the effort of sorting through the grits. Nihilistic and prophetic, darkened and cancelled in acceleration, Nick Land foreshadowed that “Mass computer commoditization de-differentiates consumption and investment, triggering cultural micro-engineering waves that dissociate theopolitical action into machinic hybridites, amongst increasingly dysfunctional defensive convulsions” (Land 2011 p.397). Pockets of resistance, brief spasms of a light blinking until dark forever, weakened and relaxed into the plane, becoming contingent once more, manifestations in devices arising only by taking from (n-1), not growing from (n+1), the planes, and even then barely managing to emerge, they eventually rippled into stillness.

As with art in general, the end of music production was not the death of music. The activity of production, the art of production itself may have ended but not music or the recording. Over a century and a half after Hegel’s lectures, Arthur Canto wrote in ‘After the End of Art’ (1997) that the end of art was not the same as the death of art:

It was not my view that there would be no more art, which ‘death’ certainly implies, but that whatever art there was to be would be made without benefit of a reassuring sort of narrative in which it was seen as the appropriate next stage in history. What had come to an end was that narrative but not the subject of that narrative.

(Canto 1997, p4)

The era of the age of pop was, in the 1980s in which ‘art after the end’ was becoming a familiar discourse, coming into its own in the destruction of the single genius and the rise of the many and dismantling the grand narrative, only in the end (by which we mean as a term of hindsight, concretising the apparent contemporary fluidity through reflection that retroactively solidifies the past) to be seen as another epoch, similar but different to those that came before it. Canto wrote that the end of one narrative was not ‘the’ end, as “life really begins when the story comes to an end” (1997, p.4), and that “The claim that art is ended is really a claim about the future - not that there will be no more art, but that such art as there will be is art after the end of art, or, as I have already termed it, post-historical art” (1997 p.43). Such writings about the future are not “predicting but prophesying”. In truth, we compare the now to history, but we also compare the now to the future, even if we are speculating on the turn of events in order to provide the model by which to make the comparison. The Idea is, for us, one existing model by which to view the now. If we decide that it is not the Idea and its self-knowledge that is the reality, but instead that Creativity is the real god, then Creativity in its self-realisation finds other fertile ground when it is finished with one field, tossing aside the eras, artists, genres and styles as it goes (it may even toss aside Idea once it has been used for its own purposes). And if production of music was one of those then its tossing aside, its deproduction, was another bloom and decay, the irreversible natural process of entropy where dissipation becomes so wide into the plane it is rendered beyond invisible and into non-existence. And yet production (in the form of record production) had such humble beginnings, wax disks and phonographs, then later the lone figure sat at a large mixing desk strewn with knobs and faders, with all that has been captured from the virtuosic performers, creative artists and genius songwriters at their fingertips. After that it was no longer a solitary act but an act of coproduction, in twos, in threes, in tens, in millions. After that the technology took over and finished the job of producing everything. After that, here and now, at what looks like another end, we await with excitement as to how this end will be annulled and, in some future reflection, possibly be revealed as the continuous collaboration of coproducers.