In the beginning there was feedback: the machines speaking on their own, answering their supposed masters with shrieks of misalliance. Gradually the humans learned to control the feedback, or thought they did, and the next step was the introduction of more highly refined forms of distortion and artificial sound, in the form of the synthesizer, which the human beings sought also to control. In the music of Kraftwerk, and bands like them present and to come, we see at last the fitting culmination of this revolution, as machines not merely overpower and play the human beings but absorb them, until the scientist and his technology, having developed a higher consciousness of its own, are one and the same. - Lester Bangs, Kraftwerkfeature (1975)
From Menschmachine to Übermensch
Even in 1975, Lester Bangs could rightly claim that electronic musicians had been subsumed by their means of production. The dialectic which birthed the "Menschmachine" began with the industrial period and culminated at the beginning of the computer age. This development was foreshadowed in the work of Marx, who understood that humans are alienated from labor essentially by labor and, thereby, that our lives are deprived of it inherent value to the degree that we produce. Kraftwerk themselves alluded to the dystopic fact that, even in places where Marx's ideas were put into practice, the alienating effects of labor were irremediable. In Die Roboter, they spoof the dehumanizing effect of communism with lyrics in Russian that say "I'm your slave. I'm your robot." Through labor, man becomes labor's slave.
Over the last 30 years, electronic music has evolved from a fledgling experiment into a ubiquitous fact influencing every area of culture. Much in the way automation changed industry, sequencing and programming allowed musicians to let the machines do the work while they attended to more pressing matters. The effects of this were, initially, positive as one could do more with less and could perform solo, if need be, to their preprogrammed arrangements. As sequencers, samplers and drum machines became cheaper and more available, we saw the rise of the producer/musician, a solo artist who controlled not only the performance, but the production of his work. The Menschmachine evolved and the musical replicants flourished.
The downside to the electronic musician's growing autonomy is that even the most clever programming is still of the order of the predetermined. The artist is no longer fallible. The performance is no longer a hard fought victory, a risky undertaking accomplished with talent and poise. Consequently, music has lost some of its swagger. Musicians find ways to bend the machines to their musical will and to reincorporate a spirit of musical adventure into their performances, but, as man melds with machine, there is a risk the musical spirit will diminish.
Of course, artists like Kraftwerk proved that the desire to create could overcome the supposedly "cold" and "mechanical" nature of synthesizers and drum machines, enhancing their artistic process at the same time. In the Marxist paradigm, artists are like alchemists, because they deify life instead of reifying death. Rather than alienating him, it is his very work which sustains the artist. From this archimedean point originates the next evolutionary overcoming in the dialectic of man and machine: the rebirth of music from the spirit's tragedy. Through mechanical suicide the human spirit resurrects itself anew. The musical Übermensch, a musician whose spirit expresses itself unalienated through the formal aspects of τέχνη arises from the corpse of the Menschemachine.
From Logos to Eros
Jacques Lacan claimed that the unconscious is structured like a language. This follows, in a way, from Hegel's idea that, rather than being a priori in a Platonic sense, meaning coexists with us and reveals us to ourselves in the world through language. Of course, for Marx, this idea of logos mediated by physis and reconciled as being in the world still carried unwanted metaphysical baggage. Leaning toward Hegel, Kojève found a compromise which proposed that man's objectivization through labor signifies the supernatural (i.e., Being beyond appearance). Through labor and its products, human being is made tangible. Time is reified and nature is made logical. Musical work presents musical spirit in the world.
Sound is the result of vibration. Although vibration occurs in time, an ongoing awareness of time is not required to hear sound. To hear music, sound as language, one requires an ongoing awareness of time (i.e., consciousness). Birdsong may sound to us as music. To the bird, however, it's an encoded imperative eliciting a hardwired response. Something similar occurs when electronic instruments interact through midi. A process is performed, but with no awareness of its meaning. A synthesizer or a programmed piece of music has no awareness of the value of its labor. A computer cannot be alienated from its labor the way a human can.
Who or what exactly do we speak of when we say a worker is alienated from his labor? Marx might answer this question by saying nobody is alienated, because as soon as one begins to labor in the world, one loses one's labor and oneself. Additionally one's lost self "becomes an object, an external existence" that "exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him... a power on its own confronting him" or, as Derrida says, haunting him. The irony is that he is a ghost being haunted by his reified self, his negation. The product becomes master as producer becomes slave. It is in this sense too, that, following Hegel's classic dialectic, we see that the object turned subject loses the value it takes away from the subject turned object that produced it. Like the work of the computer, the work of the alienated producer becomes logic without passion, the human confronted by its lack.
Ontologically speaking, the human is negated as it actualizes itself in nature, only to regain itself through an overcoming of this negation. As Kojève tells us, the fear of death makes slaves out of men. For the artist, spiritual existence depends on adherence to his vision. Yet, his material survival in a world of commercial pollution often depends on his vision's negation. The issue might be phrased in terms of Lacan's vel: "Your artistic integrity or your life." It is the rare artist who can stick up for himself in such a toxic environment.
Only through taking a stand in defiance of alienation and casting away the knave's cloak of commodity can the artist shepherd logos through nature that it may emerge as eros. For the erotic is not merely brute sensuality, it is the spiritualized principle in art resulting from spirit's synthesis with nature. Eros is the supernatural made natural as human being. It is through logos that humans understand each other. It is by nature that we are bound to one another. It is through eros that we commune. Thus, the thyrsus doubles as the torch of the humanity.
From Production to Expression
What is called for today are producers who, in an act of metaphysical détournement, appropriate the formal aspect, the τέχνη , of programmed music and reinvest it with human spirit (i.e., fallibility, risk, oppurtunity for overcoming). Fighting fire with fire, these ghosts haunt the regime of reified predetermination whose oppression they've born quite patiently. Human freedom exists initially in how you say it rather than what you say. When what you say is superceded by how you say it, then you're really saying something. This, perhaps the distinction between poetry and prose, is certainly the distinction between production and expression. Expression is production without product or producer. Expression is process. Nothing is produced, as Baudrillard says, because production only occurs in a ghostworld of labor for labor's sake. In the world of the living, ironically a ghostworld to this, there is expression- labor for the sake of Being. Product and producer are one and the same. Product is an extension of producer. There is no longer selling oneself. There is only being oneself. Reinvesting in creativity, community and, ultimately, reality, the artist rehumanizes culture that culture may sustain him spiritually. The rest is, as they say, for the birds.
