In a post on the Birdhouse earlier this week, Scot noted that
It seems that when I buy a CD, it only gets touched once. Not because it's not good, but because it only needs to be ripped once. After that, it's in iTunes, on the iPod, or pumped to the living room via Airport Express, and the meatspace disc does nothing but take up space. If all I really want is bits, why futz with atoms?
Which led me to comment that the physical presence of musical media is an essential part of their appeal. For me, this is particularly true with LPs, with their unique chemical vinyl smell overlaid with the old-book smell of the dust jackets; their large-format cover art; their irreducible physicality and "there-ness" that forces you to be an active listener: you have to get up every 22 minutes to flip the side.
Scot responded that he doesn't only care about bits, but that digital music has replaced some of the physical aspects of the listening ritual. He even linked to an article of his that laments the loss of "some of the funk" of going to a record store, digging through the bins, and careful handling of the discs themselves. All well and good: Scot mourns the loss of a ritual and a presence as he adopts a new way of doing things. Many would not be so respectful.
But this exchange got me wondering if I am guilty of reinscribing a pernicious logocentrism (or phonocentrism?) into the debate. That is, by celebrating the immediate aspects of the ritual, the things that are present to me, I am privileging the present over the absent. By doing so I invoke a metaphysics of presence in which the ideal experience is one that is immediate: i.e., an experience of pure being beyond any representations. Anything that impinges upon this immediacy taints the experience: so recorded music is inferior to live, and crappy sound is inferior to good sound, and lo-fi digital sound is inferior to uncompressed digital sound. This longing for a transcendental signified, oft expressed as "God" or "pure Being", in which all signification stops because the thing is identical with its representation: it's the classic move of a metaphysics of presence.
But this resistance to digital music is important to me. I cling to the vinyl ritual out of deliberate opposition to mass consumer culture. Vinyl is slow, not terribly convenient, not at all portable, and smelly: all exact opposites of capitalist culture's drive toward fast, sleek, ubiquitous, sanitized technology.
Philip R. Wood, in an excellent essay studying the ebb and flow of Sartrean existentialism, describes the capitalist drive toward endless change thus:
The society created by modern capitalism, in other words, is the first to have required constant change in values -- at all levels -- as the sine qua non of its very existence. This informs so many levels of our existence that we accept it as normal and forget what a recent historical phenomenon it is. One has only to recall the various possible combinations of mildly condescending amusement and nostalgia with which we regard family photographs, intellectual fashions, or even family arrangements or objects of sexual desire of a mere twenty years ago.
Because a metaphysics of presence supposes a transcendental value that undergirds all other values, it is the mortal enemy to capitalism's requirement of constant change. In this way we can see the anti-logocentric project, as expressed by thinkers like Derrida, as an apologia for capitalism's ferocious change obsession. The deconstructive project both describes and creates a subjectivity and a textuality that are constantly at play, never fixed in their meanings, always deferred until later, always different from what they were. All this occurs, of course, in the context of an absolutely vital and necessary undertaking: that of coming to grips with the absence of transcendental values (the "death of God").
I have no particular wish to reinstate transcendental values, or resurrect God. To me, he is comfortably dead. But in his place, contemporary capitalism provides less than nothing: in capitalism's eye, there can be no stable ground, for to provide one would cause the wheels of the machine to stop turning. And this is the difficulty: for how can we resist the machine without recourse to a metaphysical substrate of value?
I have an intuition that we can move toward this by resurrecting not God, but Sartre. His conception of subjectivity is notable in that it exalts human freedom, retaining room for free play and difference, without resting on a metaphysical grounding in which the self is conceived as completely identical to itself, or as emanating from a divine consciousness/being. Because the self, to Sartre, is a nothingness, it cannot be identical to itself: for if you compare nothing to nothing, the comparison fails. In this conception of the self, there is a ground for action, without conceiving that ground as eternal, immutable, transcendental. In other words, the ground of action is expressed in human terms, not divine ones.
So, as humans -- messy, contradictory, ever-changing, non-self-identical -- we can ground our own values on nothing more than the preciousness of free choice. And on the basis of that I can make a case for the continuing appeal of the vinyl ritual: because it is attractive and enjoyable in certain irreducible ways, it provides a way to exercise my own choice of resistance. No metaphysics required.
Posted by Chris at November 26, 2004 02:50 PM