On gatekeeping and capital
A loose collection of thoughts on a possible transition from chaotic scene energy to positive order
As explained in the description, Dream City Turmoil is a hub for the analysis of contradiction and tension within electronic music. The idea of a music scene as a chaotic, amorphous and tension-filled entity has already been covered in several previous entries on this page. In fact, it’s becoming harder to not draw the conclusion that any scene operating within a modern capitalist framework will be shaped in a similar fashion: profit chasing vs. creative integrity, intimacy vs. mass stadium euphoria, infantilization/escapism vs. political impact, purism vs. eclecticism – the list is about a mile long. Furthermore, Dream City Turmoil has also documented that said tension is a rich source of inspiration and artistic energy for the players on the data highway. The social media squabbles, creative schisms and wildly differing degrees of emphasis on sensitivity and conscientiousness lead both to the implosion and rebirth of scenes, usually through the formation of groups of actors who coalesce around the utility of a specific artistic expression, only to then rip said utility to shreds through conflict regarding how to best preserve and explore its potential.
Does it always have to be this way, though? The image of a music scene as an autonomous, mutating and unstable entity has been a highly pervasive one for a long time already. What if it for once stopped being that way due to a concerted effort from its actors? Will the scene automatically be doomed to stagnation, or could this new stability be used to gain deeper insight into aspects of humanity for which spoken language is an insufficient expression? This is where the concept of gatekeeping comes into play. Gatekeeping in an artistic context, however, can quickly lead to a sense of dread, as it historically encompasses a strict, puristic and authoritarian stage for culture. Here, conformity is crowbarred into the heads of the players on it, and the rejection of a cultural prescription will cause you and your artistry to languish in obscurity at best, and subject you to outright persecution at worst.
The Soviet Union’s transition from constructivism to socialist realism has a number of examples of such problems. One of them was Wassily Kandinsky, who pioneered both abstract art and expressionism at the start of the 20th century. Along with painters like German Bauhaus stalwart Paul Klee, he would form the expressionist collective Blue Rider, named after one of Kandinsky’s most pivotal expressionist paintings.
After being forced to leave Germany and return to Russia during the outbreak of World War I, Kandinsky developed his own theory on the analysis of color and form. The work culminated with the 1910 book Concerning the spiritual in art:
”Painting is an art and art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul […]”
“If art refrains from doing this work, a chasm remains unbridged, for no other power can take the place of art in this activity. And at times when the human soul is gaining greater strength, art will also grow in power, for the two are inextricably connected and complementary one to the other. Conversely, at those times when the soul tends to be choked by material disbelief, art becomes purposeless and talk is heard that art exists for art’s sake alone.”
Kandinsky’s heavy emphasis on abstract art as a gateway to the human soul earned him a large number of detractors at the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture. They decried his work as “mutilated spiritism” that flew in the face of Vladimir Tatlin’s constructivist movement, which exalted an exact analysis of the materials constituting the growing urban and industrial spaces in Russia. Constructivists wanted to slash the ties to the sensual appeal of art, arguably due to its alleged detrimental effect on the effort towards class consciousness among Russia’s population (in contrast, Kandinsky was born to a family of wealthy merchants). By 1921, after the Bolshevik revolution, said criticism of Kandinsky’s work had morphed from constructivism into a full-blown, party-prescribed socialist realist doctrine courtesy of Maxim Gorsky:
”Socialist Realist art must follow four rules, Gorky went on: it must be proletarian: that is, relevant and coherent to the workers; it must be typical, in that it must represent the everyday lives of the Russian people; it must be stylistically Realist; and it must be partisan: it must actively support the aims of the Russian State and the Communist Party.”
Kandinsky now found himself in an extremely hostile artistic environment that was being actively gatekept by the Soviet arm of art censorship, Glavlit. He therefore saw no other option but to once more leave the country for Germany.
Clearly, the term “gatekeeping” needs a solid dose of rehab before it can be employed for something else than centralization of power and ostracism of “threats” to said power. What would such rehab look like, though? Can the idea of gatekeeping even be salvaged from the kind of authoritarian excesses that a quick look in a history book will reveal? In order to avoid a repeat of history, a foundational change to the idea of value could constitute the necessary game changer. In more specific terms, this means that scenes will subsist on a highly decentralized symbol of value that artists’ work can be exchanged for. The most obvious practical solution to this would be supplanting traditional currency with cryptocurrency, however, as of 2021, it’s hard not to be skeptical of this. Nation states around the globe still have far too much power in the hands of old money, and the necessary infrastructure for a cryptocurrency-based economy is also owned by old money. Still, (in)famous accelerationist philosopher and overall tech abyss gazer Nick Land is of a quite different opinion. If Land's read of Immanuel Kant is correct here, humans already have all the tools of perception necessary to wrest the assignment of value away from old money to new decentralized money. Unfortunately, after emailing MetaNihil for some help deciphering your daily dose of Landian verbosity in this regard, he promptly proceeded to dump a bucket of ice water on this particular bonfire. To paraphrase:
”Cryptocurrency does not replace fiat currency in terms of value. It IS cryptographically sealed value in and of itself, whereas fiat currency is only a SYMBOL of value, a value that is outside of and not beholden to human perception.”
Land has on numerous occasions staunchly rejected the idea of shaping a society around the suppression of or resistance against the force of capital, since he views capital as an unstoppable force that permeates all human relations. It follows from this that if humans are to employ cryptocurrency as any kind of liberating force, they must have a clear view of its material ramifications, instead of letting it take the form of another banshee of Marxist fetishism roaming freely around in our heads via fiber-optic cables. One of the most obvious roads to such material consciousness is Bitcoin’s impact on climate change, seeing as how its global existence is dependent upon an electricity consumption of 500 TWh a year, almost twice the energy expenditure of all of the United Kingdom. Sadly, any attempt at fueling Bitcoin with green energy will inevitably be subsumed by the same capital force humans are trying to wriggle loose from, since all technology and investment into said shift will also have to originate from capitalism’s overarching profit motive. It almost seems like, no matter how you slice it, capital establishes a seemingly bulletproof and life-preserving framework for itself in enabling and furthering any exchange of value, including the forms of energy said exchange releases (much to the chagrin of the late Mark Fisher and his acolytes). Furthermore, humans are too reliant upon and addicted to said framework simultaneously to both make full use of and come up with any sort of effective control mechanism for it. Indeed, if people like Land get their way, it is not outside the realm of possibility that cryptocurrency will control HUMANS instead. Should crypto mining ever be freed from its reliance upon fossil fuels and other fundamental material restrictions, the subsequent acceleration of technological progress for the maximization of value accruement might very well produce Bitcoin’s own anti-Marxist counterpoint to the narrative of history. All of the energy spent on cryptocurrency-related efforts will now create a giant gash in the firewall between symbol and value, allowing humans a direct interface to the violent value stream of capital. Class consciousness evaporates as humans are utterly and completely atomized in the race to finish the next calculation in the blockchain, and the psychosocial influence of this rat race (social media, tech and the tendrils of Silicon Valley on nitro fuel) hyperspeeds alienation to the point that only a select few high-value individuals get to meaningfully shape the future. The end result is the kind of monarchic technocracy NRxers have been salivating over for years.
Unfortunately, without some way to break the frame of capital (one that actually makes use of the full potential within it instead of clamping it down for damage control), it seems unlikely that musicians can establish dedicated communities for even greater probing of the linguistically inaccessible self, even with the help of decentralization. However, while the force of capital can seem completely insurmountable, it would be unwise to underestimate the amount of potential and energy that is left floating free within its framework. Breaking the frame of capital, after all, also means breaking away from ideas setting humans up as simple antagonists and protagonists along the lines of an old-timey dialectic. In a constant tug-of-war between a self-preserving framework and the kinetic, value-seeking players inside of it, something’s got to give.
(Hellweg’s note: There’s a lot more to say on capital and its fetishized form, particularly if I ever manage to burrow through the pages of the doozy that is Fanged Noumena. Oh boy.)