by david stevens

 

Before I begin with some of Aristotle’s thoughts on education and the role of music, let me first prologue this post with one of my favorite quotes on education (and, consequently-naturally, on ‘work’) from what is easily one of the most important and visionary books of the 20^th century—Frithjof’s 1977 book, On Being Free:  “One of the most glaring faults that is rarely raised in the countless conversations on the topic of ‘What is wrong with our schools?’ is the simple fact that teachers in high schools are normally expected to teach six or seven hours every day…The prevailing time-arrangement is enough to make the infliction of real harm inevitable.  No one could possibly be interesting for six whole hours day after day.  No one, no matter how well read or how intelligent, can be genuinely stimulating and exercise the students’ minds with new information or new ideas at this relentless pace…Who can do this on a 9 to 3 o’clock basis?…No one in our culture would dream of measuring a stand-up comic, or a jazz musician, against a forty-hour week.  It is quite understood that playing a few sets might leave a man exhausted, and no one would suggest that anyone working such short hours does not earn his keep.  Has anyone proposed that the exertions of a football or a baseball player should be assessed in terms of time?  Imagine someone saying of a soccer goalie that making those breathtaking ‘saves’ was, after all, only six minutes of work!” (from the ‘Freedom and Education’ chapter—pp. 138-139).

 

Aristotle, who lived from 384 - 322 Before the Common Era, and who invented the first system of formal logic, and who tutored Alexander the Great from 343 – 341 B.C.E., wrote in his Politics that, “There are four customary branches of education; they are—(1) reading and writing, (2) gymnastic exercises, (3) music, to which is sometimes added (4) drawing. Of these, reading and writing and drawing are regarded as useful for the purposes of life in a variety of ways, and gymnastic exercises are thought to infuse courage. But concerning music, a doubt may be raised—in our own day most men cultivate it for the sake of pleasure, but originally it was included in education, because nature herself, as has been often said, requires that we should be able not only to work well, but to use leisure well; for, as I must repeat once again, the first principle of all action is leisure. Both are required, but leisure is better than occupation and is its end; and therefore the question must be asked, what ought we to do when at leisure? Clearly we ought not to be amusing ourselves, for then amusement would be the end of life. But if this is inconceivable, and amusement is needed more amid serious occupations than at other times (for he who is hard at work has need of relaxation, and amusement gives relaxation, whereas occupation is always accompanied with exertion and effort), we should introduce amusements only at suitable times, and they should be our medicines, for the emotion which they create in the soul is a relaxation, and from their pleasure we obtain rest.”

 

Setting aside translations from Greek for a moment, notice in the last sentence the proximity that Aristotle gives the word “medicine” to the word “emotion.” I’ll come back to that kinship in a few moments as it relates to music, but for now, very briefly, let’s first take a look at Aristotle’s “first principle of action”—as that will be the first point to my overall post here. Eight and half years ago, at The Magic Stick on Woodward Avenue, in Detroit, I had a long conversation with world-renowned DJ/Producer, Stacey Pullen—one of the very few heralded leaders in the “second wave” of Detroit’s Techno artists. One of the things that Stacey said to me that stands out for reasons well beyond the reverb of its pertinence to this post, is this: “Music is the only thing that hits mass amounts of people. I mean, music is the only way you can get a lump sum of people together for the same cause. You can go to a movie, and you're not going to have 100,000 people in the theatre. You can go to a museum, where there are artists who make visual art, or just art period—and they sort of like being in the underground; they like having their own clientele that they get on the DL, where they know something that everybody else doesn't know. But MUSIC—it’s everybody. Think about how Woodstock changed generations back then; where now, people are throwing raves that are hitting thirty and forty thousand people in the same place. It's a movement.”  The point, of course, in bringing up the parallels that Stacey draws between music and socio-political motion that maneuvers itself within and throughout spatio-temporal history, is to highlight how Aristotle was not wrong with his “first principle of all action is leisure”—in fact, one could make the case that Aristotle’s ancient analysis could not be more spot-on than in precisely today’s postmodern/post-theoretical times; for if one thinks there exists a counter-argument to Aristotle’s claim, or if one simply disagrees with him, perhaps we might ask that person how it comes to pass, then, that he or she looks forward to their weekends?; or, similarly, we might ask him or her why they save up their money and accrue their allotted vacation days, both derived from their places of employment, only to get as far away as they can from the very occupation that itself makes possible such leisure in the first place? The point is, if we disagree with Aristotle’s “leisure is better than occupation,” we can only logically do so from the perspective that our work (our “occupation”) is an end in itself, and not merely a means to some other end. If that is true, then we are the lucky few whose perspective about the nature of our work translates what Aristotle meant by “occupation” not into the rigmarole of a meaningless job, but into the true meaning of actual work—which then becomes, eo ipso, its own leisure.

 

Aristotle goes on to write in that same paragraph, “But leisure of itself gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment of life, which are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure. For he who is occupied has in view some end which he has not yet attained; but happiness is an end, since all men deem it to be accompanied with pleasure and not with pain. This pleasure, however, is regarded differently by different persons, and varies according to the habit of individuals; the pleasure of the best man is the best, and springs from the noblest sources. It is clear then that there are branches of learning and education which we must study merely with a view to leisure spent in intellectual activity, and these are to be valued for their own sake; whereas those kinds of knowledge which are useful in business are to be deemed necessary, and exist for the sake of other things. And therefore our fathers admitted music into education, not on the ground either of its necessity or utility, for it is not necessary, nor indeed useful in the same manner as reading and writing, which are useful in money-making, in the management of a household, or in the acquisition of knowledge and in political life; nor is it like drawing, useful for a more correct judgment of the works of artists, nor again like gymnastics, which gives health and strength; for neither of these is to be gained from music. There remains, then, the use of music for intellectual enjoyment in leisure; which is in fact evidently the reason of its introduction, this being one of the ways in which it is thought that a freeman should pass his leisure.”

 

Okay, besides Aristotle having successfully proffered a purpose to leisure, let me bring my first point full circle—as music today, especially electronic music, goes well beyond simply giving our leisure time a raison d’être—before I close with the second and final point I have in mind: I suppose the reason we might want to recall how Aristotle broke education down into four categories has something to do with how and why he thought music should even be included whatsoever. I realize at this point I’m already at a stretch, but if you’ll be patient with this line of thought for just a few more seconds, again his four categories are: 1) reading and writing [obviously, since any further and any other part of education assumes it], 2) gym/exercise [since now our national conversation has, once again, but over the course of the last 40 years, come back around to “health care reform”], 3) drawing [since he thought it was important to know (and who could disagree?) what it is that the artists are up to], and 4) music [since, as I’ve outlined hitherto and will continue to outline henceforth, it is the single largest cultural thread that weaves the social fabric of humanity's on-going global project of progress]. However, what really sticks out in my mind—besides the fact that he freely admits that there is surely some “doubt” about whether to include music in a curriculum [apparently some things haven’t changed since ancient times!]—is the fact that he links music up with “leisure,” and makes a solid argument for the importance of leisure in people’s lives. I mean, his first principle of action is leisure. He said that, “nature herself, as has been often said, requires that we should be able, not only to work well, but to use leisure well…Both are required, but leisure is better than occupation and is its end; and therefore the question must be asked, ‘what ought we to do when at leisure?’” Aristotle poses a good question, but unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view), philosophers have always had an amazing capacity to state the obvious; however, contra-distinctively, perhaps it is precisely because some things are all-too-obvious (hiding in plain sight, as it were) that non-philosophers continue to overlook them, and are therefore only able to point them out as obvious after the fact. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to repeat the most obvious part of what Aristotle said: leisure is your occupation’s end. I repeat, unless you consider your occupation to be your true Work, leisure is your occupation’s end, period. And if it is, then your occupation is just a “job.” Having said that, it’s difficult to imagine too many other statements that are more obviously true than that; but the irony is that it’s rare to meet somebody’s acquaintance that has actually thought through, to its final conclusion, the meaning of that idea. And it holds true even for that rare minority who are absolutely, truly, and sincerely in love with their work—for those small few, their work is itself also the very leisure they pursue; it is, as it were, built-in. The point is, in either case, Aristotle was right. And that is at the heart of New Work—the pursuit of one’s work that is, to paraphrase Frithjof here, also one’s most “authentic want.” To set up an overly simplistic syllogism here, since the majority of this country’s population comprises the middle-class, and since “job creation” is clearly a central political theme in the lives of this country’s majority, then Work is THE central concern for this country’s middle-class. Again, I’m reminded of what Aristotle went on to write a little later in his Politics, especially insofar as nothing much has changed since the time he wrote it: “In every city the people are divided into three sorts: the very rich, the very poor, and those who are between them. Therefore, the most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank.” The genius of his statement, though, is actually its silent implication—namely, that the annihilation or disappearance of the “middle rank” would logically imply the most IMPERFECT political community for the two remaining ranks.

 

Now I come to my second point in closing this post, and part of my thinking behind it is to respectfully beseech you to weigh in on any potential ways and means to move this idea forward: first, to be clear, we might ask, ‘where are we going with all of this?’ ‘How has this so far been related to work?’ ‘To the economy?’ ‘To culture?’ ‘To music?’  Well, to start, I think that new values re-invent out-dated observations. Since out-dated observations are obvious, I won’t go into them here. But what do I mean by “new values”? What I mean to suggest is a hybrid-meaning of both the typical ethicist’s term (any moral maxim, for instance) and the typical economist’s usage of the term (any fiscal worth concern—for example ‘profits’). My conception of ‘value’ is neither of those, but keep in mind that it is simultaneously also both: in a word, it is how a new ethical construct is able to frame the very means through which we can enable a new notion of fiscal worth. To simplify and frame this idea more explicitly, as just one example, in terms of our planet’s natural resources, on the energy front at least (aside from New Work's Stirling Engine), we would consider wind turbines and solar panels as just two of the most popular physical manifestations of what I mean in the broader sense of a “new values” realm—a new ethical approach (the environment) from which an old market economy (energy supplies) produces its profits. From this, in what might be called our current “post-political” age, perhaps a healthy way to re-conceive, in the verve and vein of Frithjof’s “New Work/New Economy/New Culture” model, a more vigorous de-centralizing of the out-dated job system’s absurd function is to reconnect the necessary relationship between education and [actual] value-added work; and, in this way, to re-remember (or, if one likes, to un-forget) how one of the more crucial components to both education and progress in human development is music. That music even exists is quite sublime. I would therefore certainly claim that music is far and away the most significant and most intriguing human invention of all time—rivaled only by, perhaps, Space Exploration. To that end, then, music clearly transcends mere “leisure” (or, in today's lexicon, “entertainment”), and plays a super crucial tone in re-fashioning the more widely-known Sartrean “being/doing/having” modes of human existence.  Having said that, since education is a direct correlate of work, then music—specifically in the model I will very briefly thread here, Detroit Techno—could be welcomed as a very good friend and life-long partner of New Work!  Imagine all the ways. 

 

I attended the very first three Detroit Electronic Music Festivals (DEMFs) in 2000, 2001, and 2002, and in the second and third years—after the word about its first-year success soared around the globe and back—I recall the numerous occasions where I casually struck up conversations with people who happened to be standing next to me in the middle of a very crowded Hart Plaza, only to find out that they flew in from their native countries to be in Detroit specifically for the festival; often times I would learn that it was their very first visit to the U.S.!  I remember speaking with people from Berlin, Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Paris, Prague, Lausanne, Jerusalem, Tokyo, Caracas, Santiago, and even Beirut. It was fantastic, and it was clear how and to what extent Detroit Techno was uniting the world. Solidarity was in the air, and people came from everywhere to listen up. So, if you have a strategy, or an idea, or a suggestion, or an approach, or a connexion that you could help us make, on how to go about furthering this potential alliance between Detroit Techno (or electronic music in general) and the New Work/New Economy initiative in Detroit, part of the point to this post is for you to feel free to comment and/or expand.

 

Rounding out my second point: Detroit’s unemployment rate was 15% in May, 17% in July, and just this week it hit a staggering 29%!—no wonder Time magazine bought a house there for $99,000 (intentionally paying above the average Detroit market price of $18,500): the current and fixable narrative of ‘The D’ will continue to unfold for a while, keeping journalists busy, but its story’s immediate end is, at the moment, nowhere in sight. With the national unemployment rate at 10%—although I personally think it is significantly above that—we might re-consider what Frithjof wrote in his ‘Freedom and Society’ chapter of On Being Free: “Is not the fact that unemployment constitutes a ‘problem,’ that it is perceived as symptomatic of a social disease, itself bizarre? What is the underlying structure which forces us to say, ‘Eight percent cannot work,’ when we might instead say, ‘They no longer must’? Why is our ability to produce more than enough without [their] assistance not an achievement, a hopeful sign that the day may not be too far off when perhaps no one will have to work (for money) for more than three or four hours every week, or maybe one year out of every seven? Must what should be an advance remain a calamity? It need not, but leprosy cannot be cured with baby powder” (pp. 224 & 225). One might theorize, then, that what is needful in a push toward re-introducing the socio-cultural impact of music into the scope of both educational practices and newly-imagined workplace structures is to completely politicize our economy once and for all—even if only, for starters, at the “micro” level. Why? Because an oligarchy is hardly political. The global influence and inspiration of electronic music is enormous, therefore the link between Detroit Techno and Frithjof’s New Work Centers is natural. Furthermore, since 1981 (when the second-worst Administration in the history of American politics took Office), the distinction between comedians and plutocrats slowly but surely started to emerge, until it finally erupted onto the American financial landscape last September in the risible anthropomorphic form of Hank Paulson: we laugh with the comedians because they are funny on purpose. 

 

Since the late Tip O’Neill happened to be correct when he said that “all politics is local,” then not only is the clichéd adage “think globally, act locally” absolutely correct, but the previous Administration’s unwitting, unmentioned, and anti-intellectual mantra of its opposite—‘act globally, think locally’—is just yet another proof (not that we need another proof!) for how the last eight years of alleged leadership was the sum of all things disastrous. The point is, by politicizing our economy through a locally implemented New Work/New Economy/New Culture initiative, the banking/trading/hedging/insuring/brokering oligarchy that, for some self-deluded reason, has heretofore thought of itself as actually functioning within the parameters of Smithian “invisible hand” [laissez-faire] capitalism, will ipso facto dissolve without bubbles into the unrecoverable depths of irrelevance. But that’s precisely the point to a micro-economic New Work initiative in Detroit—that its very conception correctly and astutely presupposes that the traditional financial sector in the U.S. economy is already, and has been, marginally relevant at best. To illustrate, perhaps I could write a joke to look something like this: How do we know that economists and MBAs haven’t had the time to read very many novels? Because they literally take Adam Smith’s term “invisible” figuratively! If my joke is funny, it’s because investment bankers (and the like), perpetually suffering from a classic case of Sartrean “mauvaise foi,” fooled themselves into thinking that their jobs are not non-value-added work, and that packaging, selling, and insuring CDSs and CDOs is actually the business and practice of capitalism proper. If, on the other hand, my joke is not funny, it’s because the oligarchs also mistook the term “invisible” to mean that they themselves were the only things not visible, and that, by default, they were unaware of the fact that they were not, by any stretch, the only ones on the planet who were fully aware of how only a part of the American economic engine runs on TRUE capitalism. Why else would the Swiss government force their banks to release the names of 52,000 Americans to the IRS? Could it be that the Swiss also realized that those 52,000 people collectively harbor tax-haven accounts worth over $15 billion (with a “b”), and that by not giving that money back to the very government which made it possible for those Americans to earn it in the first place would be nothing short of supporting a huge welfare subsidy for the very people who hate welfare the most? To spotlight with a million-candlelight power the crux of what this unprecedented geopolitical shift in international diplomacy means for the global economy, consider the following two ahead-of-their-time quotes from Frithjof’s 1977, On Being Free—where the second quote logically follows from the one that precedes it:  “The primary condition of freedom is the possession of an identity, or of a self—freedom is the acting out of that identity.  Tell me a man's identity and I will tell you his freedom, tell me its limits and I will tell you when he is coerced” (from the 'A Theory of Freedom' chapter, p. 37). “If some people can express their identifications only through the manipulation of great economic power, then we might point out to them that not every expression of the self is sacred.  If the identifications of some happen to be such that the social discouragement of these impulses would cramp their self-expression, then the time may have come where they should cultivate a different self” (from the 'Freedom and The Self' chapter, p. 101).

But Michigan’s Senator, Carl Levin, is thankfully on top of it all: he’s made a list of 33 other countries (besides Switzerland) that continue to hide these welfare recipient’s unpaid tax monies—Hong Kong, Bermuda, the Caymans, Panama, and the Bahamas, to name just a few. And as a result of that pressure, the Swiss bank, USB, has both handed over the names of 300 Americans who have collectively decided, of their own accords, to steal a portion of what was rightfully the U.S. federal government’s money in the first place—instead of allowing, in classic schizophrenic fashion, that decision to be handed down from the very “free market” forces that they themselves continually praise from their capitalist pulpit—and has paid a $780 million penalty for having done so. Was USB’s decision merely a political decision? Perhaps. Was it the ethically justifiable decision? Of course. The U.S. and other developed parts of the world have finally brushed the sands away from the hieroglyphs left behind by a failed shadow banking system—revealing new symbols and “mechanisms” underwritten by the value-theoretically inept and unappreciative, and the non-free-market, one-way-street flows of fake finance whose so-called meanings have, although still fairly new, existed through far too many passages of solstices and equinoxes, if just by having existed at all.  Whether the acronyms for a Credit Default Swap or a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDS or CDO) each stood in as a non-creative linguistic signifier pointing toward a speciously contrived and metaphysical signified, underlined by false profits for false prophets, is of minor importance:  for what is of major importance is that the actual value of their meanings meant nothing whatsoever to begin with—corresponding only to a vortex of blackhole capital that itself might as well have corresponded to a centaur. But, the global community is now on the cusp of a newly arrived cultural character, joined by our timeless partners in the continuing evolution of human development—the Earth and the Work we do while living on it. In what is, to my mind, one of the great and underrated anthropological books ever written, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud wrote during the summer of 1929 that, “We recognize as cultural all activities and resources which are useful to humans for making the earth serviceable to them, for protecting them against the violence of the forces of nature, and so on...The development of civilization appears to us a peculiar process which mankind undergoes, and in which several things strike us as familiar. We may characterize this process with reference to the changes that it brings about in the familiar instinctual dispositions of human beings, to satisfy which is, after all, the economic task of our lives. A few of these instincts are used up in such a manner that something appears in their place which, in an individual, we describe as a character-trait...Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life...it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presumes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression, or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This 'cultural frustration' dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings...It is not easy to understand how it can become possible to deprive an instinct of satisfaction. Nor is doing so without danger. If the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue” (pp. 42, 50, 51, & 52).

 

Speaking deductively from Freud's idea, then, in terms of how 'character-traits' perpetuate certain economic activities rather than others, or how those traits render certain cultural advancements as the very things upon which civilization itself is able to develop more profoundly or progress even further than its previous epoch, the world has already been privy to recent and year-old government “bailout” efforts and intercontinental movements of simulated cash that only symbolized ethereal assets, vaporized equity, and feigned liquidity leverage for huge investment scams—all preceded by different examples of the baser Madoffesque human instincts that were clearly mis-translated (or, to para-reference Freud's term, mis-sublimated) into personality types and activities that were somehow magically convinced that, for instance, demanding and/or gladly accepting golden parachutes and non-performance bonuses from bankrupt insurance companies, or imploding investment banks, or failed commercial banks (while simultaneously hiding those bonuses from its shareholders) somehow remotely resembled even a stitch of capitalism's true clothes. The great news is, Frithjof's New Work/New Economy/New Culture initiative has already-always known that as a species, we humans are not at all innately greedy or destructive; rather, quite the opposite and far more optimistic, that we are starting to vastly improve our understanding of how our efforts at maintaining our planet's well-being, and completely re-thinking the paradigm for how we work, can both simultaneously serve as a mode of exciting and prodigious economic activity!—not to mention how those efforts will consequently propagate newly invigorated intellectual curiosities through time. So, the question is not what Freud must've meant by “one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue”—that's already all-too-obvious and in the past-tense—the question, rather, is this:  how would it be logically impossible to surmise that mentioning these facts derives solely from a particular partisan bent on social and political theory? Well, for PRECISELY this reason:  for a nano-nano-nano-milli-milli-fraction of the revenues lost by the U.S. federal government every year to offshore tax havens—not to mention the $250 billion lost per year, every year, to INTENTIONAL corporate welfare handouts to companies that can already more than afford their own R & D and payroll overhead, and the $76 billion lost every year in federal revenues as a direct consequence of Bush’s ’06 tax cuts—we could put in place, from the ground up, in Detroit, a hugely beautiful and expansive Center for New Work, wherein a New Economy would not only sustain itself, and would itself be built upon the very sustainability model from which its internal mechanisms function throughout, but would also serve other local, statewide, regional, and overseas businesses in the process. Where do we start? Where else?—with the “New Culture” part:  MUSIC!

 

Last July, author Mark LeVine (not to be confused with the extremely confused pundit, Mark Levin) published a book through RandomHouse:  Heavy Metal Islam—Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam—in which a befitting quote captures the implicit, conceptual-kernel that my post here tries to blossom:   “Music will be the true democratizing force.” And, the late Nigerian composer and musician, Fela Kuti, has been quoted as saying, “Music is the weapon of the future.”  To anybody’s mind, music is the perfect blend of art and science—a harmony of the two, especially with electronic music—but it is thought up first by the artists, and then thrown into a symphonic existence by the technological advancements made from what is commonly referred to today as “entertainment equipment.” For example, the software developments being made, used, and continually improved upon, by the electronic music community are absolutely extraordinary. Since the advent of digital music files, programs such as Final Scratch, Traktor Scratch, and Logic Pro have forever changed the way the world’s electronic music is both presented and created. This past March, I attended my fourth annual Miami Winter Music Conference (WMC), but this year I sat down with both London, Ontario’s legendary John Acquaviva, and Bordeaux, France’s global phenomenon, Olivier Giacomotto, to chat about how sustainable energy solutions, energy efficiency, and environmentally-friendly practices might find possible applications in the world of electronic music. John, who is, bar none, the best Electro-House/Tech-House DJ/Producer on the planet, also co-founded the world’s largest and most accessed digital music download website—beatport.com. When I asked him about the progress being made in the context of energy-efficient technologies changing the dynamics of how energy is supplied, he mentioned that, “Over the last ten years, we’ve made real, positive moves toward efficiency—toward just that kind of progress. Think back to how music was distributed and manufactured—vinyl is a petroleum byproduct, and CDs are neither environmentally friendly nor even that easy to make. The Internet has done a lot of great things in turning that around—it revolutionized music. For example, I play my sets with a turntable, but I don’t need vinyl. I’ve used the same piece of vinyl to play back different digital music files on my laptop. It’s Final Scratch technology, and there are a number of other products that this technology has spawned. But as far as I’m concerned, the leading product, and the one that I personally use, is Traktor Scratch—made by Native Instruments. Olivier and I both use it, but we each use it differently. Artists have their own way of using it. I have my idea on how to mix with it, and Olivier mixes in his own way.” And when I asked Olivier if there ever exists a need for him to use CDs anymore, he replied, “No, I use strictly my digital files and graphical user interface on my laptop. What’s more, I can be on a flight between gigs, and use only my laptop loaded with Logic Pro and my headphones plugged in, to create a new, original track completely from scratch. I don’t even really need to go into the studio anymore, except for maybe some final touches or edits.” 

 

 

 

 

 

With the above ideas in mind, one could imagine that the possible applications, or direct involvements, of Detroit Techno/Electronic Music to and with Frithjof’s Centers for New Work and his Detroit New Economy initiative are, without a doubt, countless. Today’s music industry not only functions as its very own market economy—via true and real and actual capitalist practices—but also enjoys the single most socially expansive and emotionally influential relationship to human existence. As I said I would do near the beginning of this post, it might be interesting to note, for just a quick moment here, how Aristotle placed the word “medicine” so closely to the word “emotion.” Why? Well, if we recall, his context at the end of that quote was the soul, amusement, pleasure, relaxation, rest, and the question concerning the very purpose of “leisure,” to which music answered his call.  Thus, if we integrate music's influence into the very structure of Work in some new-valued way, then Aristotle's context surrounding the relationship betwixt “occupation” and things like “rest,” “the soul,” “relaxation,” and “leisure,” will become a previously out-dated observation that is now completely re-invented.  In 1871, Nietzsche wrote in his On Music and Words, Fragment, “All who feel, when listening to music, that the music has an effect on their emotions, resemble the lyric poet; the distant and remote power of music appeals to an intermediate realm in them that gives them, so to say, a foretaste, a symbolic pre-concept of the real music: the intermediate realm of the emotions.” Linking up the medicinal affects that music has upon human emotions—consult, for example, Oliver Sacks’ wonderfully interesting book on the healing properties of rhythm and melody, Musicophilia—Tales of Music and the Brain—and taking Nietzsche’s idea a step further in the direction toward applying that musical a-ffect to, say, stabilizing the emotional components of a collective social imbalance (like, oh, I don’t know, ridiculously un-funny unemployment numbers), consider for a moment what American poet, Jim Morrison, once wrote: “Music inflames temperament.” The theme of course is, if there was ever a socio-historical time to positively and constructively “inflame temperament”—to give energy and thrust to human development, to sustainable development, to political and social movement—it is now. Again recalling something Stacey Pullen said to me in that same conversation when I asked him about the nature of what specifically distinguishes Techno from other forms of electronic music—whether it's Tech-House, Minimal, Breakbeat, Electro, Prog-House, Goa, or whatever—he said this: “Well, I can only speak from the Detroit point of view. Because we come from a school of hard-knocks; we come from a school of innovation; we come from a school of emotions. We are prodigies of our environment: growing up in the 70s, and our parents working in the Automotive Industry, coming home and telling us that they work with these crazy robots, and that they wear these crazy glasses to make cars. (We both start laughing.) So they're coming back telling us these stories, and we're like, “Wow!” But, it doesn't all sink in until you get a little more mature and start to realize HOW the future is being built. And we took that same approach when we started making music. It was about innovation. It was about going in with total emotion and not going into a big studio. I mean, back then, it wasn't about going into these $100,000 studios and doing these tracks or whatever. It was about, ya know, sitting Indian-style with the keyboards on the floor, in the bedroom with the headphones on, incense blowin' in the air—that is how we created. It wasn't about marketing or who got the latest track out. It was about making that cassette tape, or taking that tape down to a club and letting people listen to it. That's what happened down at The Music Institute. And I can remember many times, Carl [Craig] and Derrick May going STRAIGHT FROM the studio, equipment still on, a two-track tape in hand, going down to the club, two o'clock in the morning, and putting that reel-to-reel tape on, letting people listen to it.”

 

Frithjof wrote an incredibly keen insight on p. 230 of his On Being Free: “If men through their pre-history were largely equal, then history brought first the servitude of the many under the lordship of the few, and then the servitude of all under the tyranny of work. We mean to reverse the long march in this one direction, and right the inversion of means and ends. The subordination of human life to work for wages could be the last link in a chain of subservience; with it broken, the enhancement of human life could again become the end.” After having thought about that quote (and Frithjof's book as a whole) for the last 15 years, I can only surmise how very cool capitalism could be—if only it was actually practiced by all. But, nowadays, when the American political climate extols dropping out of high school to host either a nationally-syndicated radio show or a Fox “News” program, one ought to tip-toe, as it were, through using the all-inclusive word “all” in such a way, lest one is called a “socialist” by those who’ve never read Marx.   Ironically still further, as Gore Vidal accurately put it, “What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.” The aforementioned offshore tax havens are the very proof of Vidal’s claim. And, watching Hank Paulson completely cave on his capitalist principles—under the weight of his own brutally diluted, quasi-Keynesian non-aggregate-demand “macro” economic theory for selective, non-public-works consumption—before Congress exactly one year ago this month, is not only precisely why we can distinguish him from a comedian (for I don’t think that anybody laughs at him because they think he’s funny, he's simply the embodiment of the larger picture concerning the type of “thinking” that just doesn't “get it”), but also serves as yet another proof that supports the truth-value of Vidal’s proposition.  (How else could any reasonable person not wonder about the great mysteries behind President Obama having picked Tim Geithner and Larry Summers in what would've been an otherwise phenomenal Cabinet?)  But if we think that Vidal’s central meaning in his claim is talking about ‘wealth,’ then we are confused about his claim insofar as our confusion stems less from our limited understanding of “socialism” than it does from the extent to which we are seriously misguided about the actual meaning of “free enterprise.” If, however, we think that Vidal’s claim is simply a chant designed for leading ‘the poor’ into a picket line that whoops an absurd demand for a revolutionary redistribution of wealth into places where it has not yet been earned, then not only is our analysis lacking anything critical, but we take an utterly predictable shortcut to Thinking, and by virtue of such a short path, completely miss the point. 

 

I don’t mean for this idea to, by any stretch, reconstruct how Ayn Rand’s blatant shortcoming in her “Objectivist” version of “selfishness” offered up a terribly bastardized mistranslation of Adam Smith’s more enlightened “self-interest” precept; rather, the idea here is to expound the possibility, by imploring others to post their ideas/comments/suggestions/experiences here, of how we can, in the words of John Lennon, “come together, right now,” and constructively merge, through our co-operative efforts and ideas, a functioning, self-sustaining economy agreed upon by all who freely participate in it, built upon a systemic function of its most basic rubric—Work—into the fold of the most interesting and foreshadowing cultural aspect of human existence:  music. To my mind, if one wants to find out what is going to happen in any particular mainstream social structure six or eight or ten years from now, a good place to first look is into the nature of that culture’s music scene. Music not only raises awareness and social consciousness levels like no other thing on our planet, but it's also a very effective and accurate predictor; part of a music scene’s brilliance is that as it is happening, as it is unfolding, especially with underground music movements, it is also simultaneously a sign—a “signifier”—for what has not yet happened above ground but will. Historically and even presently, Detroit has the best music scene in the world. If part of Detroit Techno’s potential involvement with Frithjof’s Centers for New Work meant that we’d see at those Centers weekly science/technology/innovation tutorials, monthly dance celebrations, track production seminars, youth music programs, workshops, demos, conferences, music technology and/or marketing inventions via The Fabricator, and the list goes on, then perhaps the word will get out enough that eventually we will see a New Work booth appear at one of the annual Detroit Electronic Music Festivals(?). To sum this part and conclude my second and final point, Aristotle goes on to write in his Politics, “When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.” 

 

Perhaps “the state” has not yet come into existence—perhaps because nobody has even tried it yet.  So let's begin.

 

Peace and Be Well.