Mix tapes and use value

[imomus]

An essay by Jon Beasley-Murray entitled Value and Capital in Bourdieu and Marx made me think about yesterday's topic of mix tapes from a slightly different angle. The music industry operates by capitalist principles, marketing cultural commodities for profit. In classic Marxist terms, we can talk fairly objectively about the "exchange value" of music: its value to the producers and distributors who profit from it. Music's exchange value appears in royalty statements, corporate balance sheets, sales charts, retail profit reports, and so on. It's numerical and objective.

Exchange value is only part of the story, though. Music also has "use value", value to its consumers. Here the economic argument falls silent, despite the fact that without use value there would be no exchange value. The use of music is seen as too subjective to talk about. What music means to me, what I do with music, how I "profit" from the music I've heard and bought, these are subjects to which no numbers can be affixed. The answers often go beyond words, passing into the realm of the religious or the spiritual, where things are simultaneously utterly real to the believer, and completely nebulous and unquantifiable. For this reason the discussion of use value has been left to artists. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard are artists, and so is Thurston Moore. Artists are considered experts in the subjective and the unquantifiable.

Now, Beasley-Murray cites John Guillory's point (made in his book Cultural Capital) that the sciences of economics and aesthetics, at least as practiced by Adam Smith and Kant, both "bracketed" use value. They did this because they both wanted their subjects to be "objective", although they defined objectivity in very different ways. Economics maintained a numerical "objectivity" (which we could also call "economistic reductionism") because it didn't want to concern itself with the subjectivity of the consumer. Aesthetics did it because it wanted to define art as something above and beyond all utility, all use value. It wanted art to be "objective" in a Platonic way: an embodiment of quasi-religious "truths" impermeable by the too-worldly logics of either use or exchange. The danger, of course, was that, like religion, this "objectivity" could all too easily be accused of being a projected, hubristic subjectivity. Why would the creator look like a man, and why would the realm of objective truth just happen to resemble the categories of human language?

Beasley-Murray then argues that Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "cultural capital" re-introduced the concept of use value into economics and aesthetics, despite the fears that these fields would be "debased" by ideas of utility. A book like Bourdieu's Distinction seems shocking to aesthetes because it proposes a sort of ulterior motive for artistic taste: the need to impress, to affirm class loyalties, to advance socially. But it also shocks economists because it muddies the numerical clarity of the balance sheet with nebulous subjective perceptions. Beasley-Murray then goes on to discuss the different ways exchange value and use value relate to time; exchange value, he says, can happen in an instant, but things must be used in and over time.

Here we should remind ourselves that Bourdieu thought that "cultural and social capital are fundamentally rooted in economic capital but they can never be completely reduced to an economic form. Rather, social and cultural capital remain effective because they conceal their relationship to economic capital." Being well-read, in other words, might be seen as a virtue in its own right, but in Bourdieu's model it's a form of capital which can be exchanged for economic capital. Being well-educated (and well-connected, another important part of the definition of "cultural capital") does make you richer, although it's difficult to make an exact link (and, Bourdieu would argue, this link is suppressed and concealed by both the economistically and aesthetically-minded). This, after all, is the logic behind most student loans schemes. Education will make you better off. With the "knowledge profit" you gain by studying, you will be able to pay off the actual money debt your study runs up.

The introduction of student loan schemes into public policy (effectively a replacement of an equality of opportunity policy with one which admits to actual differences in lived experience), the abandonment of old Marxist models like the one that says that (cultural) superstructure is determined by (economic) base, and even the appearance of a rash of books and art shows about mix tapes... what do these things have in common? I think they might be signs that Bourdieu was right, or rather, that his way of thinking is winning. As advanced societies get more consumer-oriented and more culture-oriented, and as we focus more on quality of life rather than mere affluence, we'll inevitably find ourselves looking at use value rather than exchange value. But we'll also see use value as something which can be translated back into money, which can be exchanged. (Marx anticipated this in "Capital" with his idea of 'productive consumption: "the process by which the worker consumes the means of production with his labour, and converts them into products with a higher value than that of the capital advanced. This is his productive consumption.")

It's clear from Iain and Jane's new film and Thurston's new book that something that's entirely economic (like pop music) can also be entirely subjective and even "transcendental" (like religion). It can have both use value and exchange value. But if Bourdieu is right, you can translate that use value back into exchange value: for the mix tape makers, being seen as having good taste, boasting about one's record collection, or getting laid is the ultimate goal, but for the artists collecting and collating their stories it's simultaneously about detaching pop from its market context, and returning its use value to the market in the form of books and art. (Use value here, in the form of the personal narrative, becomes an under-exploited market good, a neglected commodity.) Our tendency to segregate use from exchange value, to see one as "sullying" the other, makes us associate the two only when we want to condemn someone for duplicity or hypocrisy. I think we should lighten up about that: they're two sides of the same coin. Thurston Moore is simultaneously a merchant and consumer, a boy and a man, an amateur and a professional, a buyer and a seller, a hoarder and a spender of (sub)cultural capital. And that's okay.

Comments

Kant or Cant?

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital, as you've outlined it above, certainly sounds interesting.

However, I can't help feeling you've maligned Kant (more usually thought of as an 18th century thinker, as all his publications first appeared in the late 1700s). After all, Bourdieu - in Distinction at any rate - seems to be writing about psychological motives in the making of art whereas Kant mostly concerns himself with the audience's experience of a completed work of art, in his Critique of Judgment at least. Furthermore, his ideas on objectivity were complex and not especially Platonic: he thought the "object" of man's aesthetic faculty was purposive beauty, not truth (which is the object of knowledge); and that our aesthetic sensibilities (rather than a work of art itself) suggest to us that there is purpose behind the manifold of appearances - but we cannot demonstrate what this purpose is! Finally, although he argued that the highest use of his posited aesthetic sense was an apprehension of moral good, this good was construed as a realisation of a purposive, beautiful order to nature. Only "practical reason" amplifies this realisation into an ethics of duty; and even then, God only comes into the picture symbolically, as an idealisation of the epitome of dutiful action. That's what I reckon, anyway.

I'm not at all sure about this next thought - however: I wonder whether late-period T S Eliot might be a better (and more recent) substitute for Kant as a rather silly believer in the moral force of art and objective, Christian good.

There we go: a dusty reply and possibly not a useful one either. Then again, I haven't slept for ages and my brain's just exploded.

PS: I make a lot of mix tapes, but my conscious motive (can't report on any others)is usually to share slightly esoteric experiences with others, to see if they enjoy them and, if they enjoy them, to encourage them to buy albums by the artists on the tapes. However, my strategy to get Heinrich Schutz (or Napalm Death, for that matter) into the Top 20 is an abysmal failure to date.

Re: Kant or Cant?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I've corrected the Kant dates thing.

After all, Bourdieu - in Distinction at any rate - seems to be writing about psychological motives in the making of art whereas Kant mostly concerns himself with the audience's experience of a completed work of art

"Distinction" is about the consumption of art rather than its production. It's about judgement and taste and the way art is used as a class signifier and as "cultural capital".

Re: Kant or Cant?

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

My apologies: in my tired state, I thought you were advancing the above seeming malignment of Kant, rather than John Guillory. His argument still seems misapplied to me, however, if he's really claiming Kant imbued aesthetics with quasi-religious ideas about absolute truth: apart from Kant arguing that truth does not apply to aesthetic appreciation, John Guillory seems to invert Kant's position on ethics and religion - if anything, Kant made the religious quasi-ethical, not art quasi-religious (see his Critique of Practical Reason or Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals). Also, I doubt very much Kant would have believed in a God that looked "like a man" (!), or that he thought we could have access to absolute truth at all (the nature of human experience precluding us from access to anything beyond human understanding - i.e., the categories of our experience and rational thought - as he wrote about at length in the Critique of Pure Reason).

I'm interested in the idea of art production as involving use and exchange: do you know if Pierre Bourdieu believes this involvement is necessary in artistic creation and dissemination of art works? Also, more importantly, what does he think the term "art" signifies? I expect he would define art externally, as what people call art and which therefore changes according to the culture you inhabit - but if my guess is correct, do you know which people he thinks we should ask to define art within a given culture? I am thinking about what art might actually mean for an entry on my own blog; hitherto, I've mostly been considering the old imitation theories, "artworld theory" (that an ephemeral "artworld" decides what art is), the question of intentionality and its relevance or otherwise, and whether there can be set boundaries between music and sound - a critique of the whole project from what seems to be a neo-Marxist perspective would be most welcome!

Many thanks for your continuingly interesting posts,

Simon

[(Anonymous)]

Where did you get that picture of Jerry Garcia?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Jerry Garcia was just a hip entrepreneur who traded his Marx-like beard and hair for credibility in the counterculture, ie subcultural capital. As they say in "Hair":

I'm hairy high and low
Don't ask me why: don't know!
It's not for lack of bread
Like the Grateful Dead

[(Anonymous)]

It's agreed then. Momus is a leptologist of some calibre.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Lep`tol´o`gy (lĕp`tǒl´ô`jŷ) n. 1. A minute and tedious discourse on trifling things.

Hmm, I'm talking about use value and exchange value. On LiveJournal. Shall we look at some other people's entries for today and see if they're on bigger or smaller subjects? Do you have a journal? Where did you go today? Where did you want me to?

Sorry to disappoint, anyway. How's the weather in Melbourne?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Wait, no, sorry, King's College, London, GB. (I thought they liked Marx there.)

[(Anonymous)]

Freaky. The weather's lovely in London, but I'm down in the archives, reading correspondence between William Burroughs and the late Professor Mottram.

[(Anonymous)]

Click Opera readers have got into a huddle and said 'Let's not post a single comment today. Not a sausage. Just to freak Momus out.' Possibly a mass examination in the bequeathing of cultural capital as self-worth in the new media environment. Or it's hot out.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Is it hot in the London offices of the MCPS-PRS Alliance Ltd? (Sorry, can't keep away from this new IP tracking toy! What fun!) Hey, that reminds me, I need to tell PRS my new address so they can keep sending me cultural capital.

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

I'd like to throw Lewis Hyde's idea of a gift economy (http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC41/PinchotG.htm) into your mix, since you've got some good wheels turning: a teacher once prescribed Hyde's book to me as a placebo for being marginalized from society, since I adhere to "outmoded" and "uncommercial" forms of art and aesthetics. Of course, this requires being so naive as to believe art has some spiritual or regenerative power. I guess I'm that naive. But, anyway, it is a comforting (as opposed to snide and jaded) view for those of us who aren't on Billboard's Top Ten or the NY Times Bestseller List. :D

And as far as recordings and their exchange value, how about the idea that a recording has no value at all? It isn't music after all, it's a singular and unchanging performance. I'm hoping that the way technology is making recordings so easy to transmit is beginning to erode the idea, even to the general consumer, that a recording should have a price tag at all, that the real price tag should, once again, be on live performances (http://www.livejournal.com/users/la_aquarius/18963.html).

Thanks again for an enlightening post.

[transient-poet.livejournal.com]

I think the gift economy idea is interesting. I have quite a number of friends who profess a deep love of the theory. But there is no model for its practical implementation. It can only exist as a subset of an otherwise 'selfish' economy. The great example always cited to me is Burning Man. However, it is only a gift economy after all these hip young urban professionals lay down $200 for an entrance ticket and purchase vast quantities of supplies and 'gifts' etc. In a sense you have purchased the 'gift' with your entrance ticket.
The spirit it provides is great however. And if people can learn to give more freely in their daily lives through the experience they have in such settings I think it a wonderful thing. The example cited in teh article about Scientists giving the best papers could also be seen in the light that the presentation of a paper is a form of cultural currency, a commodity exchanged for prestige and status and tenure. Most professors afterall must have some number of peer reviewed articles published to get tenure.
As a conceptual framework for viewing problems from a different light it is useful, but in a way so is capitalism. True free market capitalism has never existed, just as true Marxist communism has never existed. The actual theory of free market capitalists, is quite similar to the stateless society of Marxist theory. If you see culture debates as circular rather than linear, the extremes look quite alike. Stalin and Hitler are little differnt save in titles. The problem with 'Capitalist' and 'Communist' systems is not the theory or the system, it is the constant interferance of ego driven state actors upon the system.
Aaack! Sorry for the rant I should stop here and start another LJ on political theory.

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

I had no idea Burning Man cost that much. It'll always leave a bad taste in my mouth, though (I've never been), since my friend's ex split up with him after going there!

What I like about Hyde's idea, though, is the notion that a gift (at least in the sense of his 'gift economy' isn't binary; it's a gift only when it's passed beyond the initial receiver to a third party. Then it sheds the skin of self-interest (receiving a favor/commodity in return) and becomes something else, the same way you or I or Momus paste in links out of nothing more than a desire to share things that tickle our fancies or make us think.

Looking forward to your LJ 'political blog'. :D

[transient-poet.livejournal.com]

That is very true. And like I said it works well as a subset, it works well in microcosm. LJ is a perfect example of a gift economy in micrososm. It is a place to share ideas and art out of a willingness to learn and expand our understanding of the world, rather than gain profit and social benefit.

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's a very positive look at LJ. Now I have a warm and fuzzy (online) feeling. :D

[transient-poet.livejournal.com]

Happy to help.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, there may be lies, damned lies, and exchange value, but one man's use value is another man's, er, "termial".

[(Anonymous)]

Wha!?

I feel the decline from my head to my toes. I hear tales of the decline from everyone I know. I see the decline in closing shops and LV bags. I've seen Japan when it's up, and now I see Japan being very down.

I just back up my thoughts with statistics so that my ideological enemies can't just dismiss it as malfunctioning sensory organs.

Marxy

[(Anonymous)]

Despite the statistics, things felt culturally robust in Japan from '98 to '00.

And if you want to move to Japan, you can move to Japan.

Marxy

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

The thing I like about Bourdieu is that EVERYTHING has a use-value, and everything is tied into the intricate web of exchange, worth, mobility and differentiation. I never finished Distinction, but all of his books on art were just beautiful. Until late in his career, he seemed to look at everything without a value judgment - people use these things as cultural capital in order to distinguish themselves from other people. It was great reading how professor distinguished themselves from everyone else and how they carved out a power base from which they could operate.

I like early Bourdieu's lack of value judgment. People don't necessarily know that their struggling for distinction, and they don't always pursue cultural capital in order to exchange it with capital, but it works that way, much like autonomous individuals create Smith's "invisible hand."

I'm rambling.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

The end of your closing paragraph when you start with "Our tendency to segregate use from...." and provide your opinion on the subject at hand is very reasonable and a view that I've been sharing with others for a few years now. Regardless of the politics at hand, an artist has a right to eat and to discuss and understand the mechanics of the "less aesthetic side" of what they do. To believe otherwise is ludicrously self-destructive.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I don't know a single successful artist who doesn't blend the two.

But lo, the sun is shining! Let's go outside.

[rciaodree.livejournal.com]

Excellent idea, Lord Whimsy. There is soccer to be played.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

...and bog orchids to find.

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

PS

The best of luck in your hunt for bog orchids (which sounds a fascinating pursuit)!

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

There certainly is and has been at least since Roman times a strong and sometimes mutually beneficial correlation between art and commerce: I'm sure we would not have innumerable works of art without patronage or people buying, selling and re-printing them. Indeed, I wonder whether anyone actually does believe commerce is somehow "dirty" while art is "pure" or "clean" - to do so seems such a bizarre misapplication of word-meaning (yuck - I'm turning Germanic and compounding concepts again!)

However, I'm afraid that any generalising comment, such as "art and commerce are inextricably linked" or even "this is art and this isn't," may tend to over-simplify and thereby distort what actually takes place. If that is so, such comments are just hot air; it's what I'm considering at the moment for my own interest.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Its just that a lot of aspiring young artists enter the arena as an aspiring "professional" and yet attempt to survive with "all commerce is evil" as part of their philosophy. In short, it won't work, unless you have an inheritance or a very kind welfare system. I consider the commercial aspect, for the artist, to be an extension of aesthetic pride.

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

No, you're right, of course: it is a very strange and often paradoxical phenomenon - like their art is fuelled by rebellion against existing social structures, including commercial interactions, yet quite commonly demands funding from society, while its makers help maintain its commercial wheels turning by contributing to the economy overall. Your attitude seems to be far less problematic!

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Its wonderful to rebel, but one can't live in an ideal while its being built to be reality. Ideally, you compromise both your reality and your ideal in order to improve both as you go. And, of course, have fun along the way.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I did go outside shortly after and happened upon otters playing in the river. I didn't have a camera to capture the moment, but it was indeed lovely.

[(Anonymous)]

http://www.audioscrobbler.com/music/Momus

Off topic, sorry. But if you go to the link above it lists the top Momus songs played by Momus fans at this certain community. Currently, the top 10 is...

1 The Homosexual
2 Corkscrew King
3 I was a maoist intellectual
4 Coming In A Girl's Mouth
5 Bluestocking
6 Life of the Fields
7 The Angels Are Voyeurs
8 Pierrot Lunaire PREMIX
9 Robin Hood
10 The Hairstyle Of The Devil