Once upon a time I did an MA in Mass Communications. My dissertation was entitled "I will survive!: The Future of the Music Industry in the Information Age". I added a 3-page afterword to my final cut - see below - which led to an offer of a PhD but ultimately led me to study law and follow up with a PGDip in UK, US and EU copyright law at King's College. However, I now believe it is time to return to the initial thought from the afterword, which I summarise as 'Creativity does not exist'. Or does it? Does it even matter? Because in the end...
...it's all a load of Bovine Skittles! (or is it?)
AFTERWORD
Parallel Reflections Made During The Completion Of This Dissertation
The initial
idea of this dissertation – once informed that the dynamics of the music
industry was a study worth pursuing – was that of attempting to better
understand the influence major record labels have on musical creativity and how
copyright laws have limited a musician’s fair use. Little did I realise the
difficulty of such an argument until I tried to lay down a definition for
‘musical creativity’. Creativity, as Keith Negus states, “is one of the most
important yet unexplored issues in the study of popular music”. Therefore, from
a sociological stance, a clear-cut understanding of musical creativity cannot
be found as it mixes the “mystical and metaphysical with the material and
mundane, the elevated with the profane” (Negus,
2002, pg 180). This difficulty to put a finger on creativity has led one
set of scholars – more precisely Steiner – to conclude that only Plato, Dante
and Hegel were truly creative, while on the other bank of the academic abyss
there are those – namely Joas and Willis – arguing that all everyday actions
are potentially creative. For these very reasons it was decided to pursue an
argument perhaps slightly more manageable: The Future of the Music Industry in
the Information Age. Nonetheless – purely out of personal curiosity – I did not
give up on the question of creativity and discovered a glimpse of an answer in
the writings of the contemporary philosopher, Robert M. Pirsig. These
reflections are added to the dissertation as they were borne from the argument
pursued herein, they do not however have any influence on the dissertation
itself.
I want to
briefly summarize what Pirsig stated so as to then reach my conclusion on
creativity – although I believe that his observations need some reflection.
Pirsig occupied himself principally with the metaphysics of Quality. He was led to believe that with
our dualistic way of thinking (subject-object) we fail to see a certain
omnipresent Quality, which is the
very element that produces a ‘later awareness’ of subject and object. That is,
at the ‘moment of pure Quality’ both
subject and object are identical, and it is only from a pre-intellectual
awareness of Quality that subject and
object are then separated. That is to say that Quality is the source of the subject and object, not vice versa. It
is this pre-intellectual sense of Quality
that leads us to choose one solution from the infinite solutions that actually
exist, usually perceiving the solution that seems most Quality-ful. It must be noted that some people have a stronger
awareness of Quality and therefore
are better at perceiving this Quality
than others, however it is this striving to perceive this Quality that has brought mankind this far. It was only when Pirsig
understood that Quality should not be
defined that he was then able to prove that it exists and thus arrive to these
conclusions.
To prove it
exists one simply must envision a Quality-less
world. This world would be completely different as, for example, banging a
table and a Beatles’ song would be perceived as the same as we would have no
sense of Quality. It is our innate
sense of Quality that allows us to
distinguish. Therefore Quality
exists, but above all it is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical
arts which, however, is lacking in the modern, dualistically-conceived,
technologic world. The creators, as in producers, no longer feel any particular
sense of identity with their creations, as in productions. With such a
well-documentated accumulation of human experience the modern world has
practically ceased to see pure Quality,
as now when it is the moment to choose which solution is the ‘right’ one we
already know (i.e. we assemble a bookshelf by reading the instructions). We
have been dualistically trained. (Pirsig,
1974)
Pirsig’s
philosophy led me to think of the correlation between his Quality and the meaning of creativity that I had so wanted to try
and describe. I believe that creativity, following Pirsig’s line of thought, is
the solution, in a ‘moment of pure Quality’,
that one perceives without been told which of the infinite solutions to take a priori. Consequently, two persons could
perceive the exact same solution, without been told of its existence,
unbeknownst to themselves and without having ever interacted and therefore be
equally creative. This becomes mind-baffling if we are to follow this train of
thought as then it could be stated that nothing is created but rather perceived
in a new way – the solution having existed all along only not seen before. This
would fall straight into the scientific approach to energy which states that
nothing can be created or destroyed and also the theological way of thinking
wherein only God can create. At this point, if we do not create it would be a
case of deriving from what we see around us and finding new ways of perception.
Therefore, how can we claim ownership to a solution that was there all the
time? Are copyright laws, following this approach to creativity, simply a legal
form of intellectual imperialism: claiming that which is not yours simply
because you “saw” it first and commercially benefiting? Mark Twain made a
notable comment on the issue, “only one thing is impossible
for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet”.
But Pirsig’s
insight on the matter of Quality
leads to another important observation. In this ‘post-modern’ (although a Roman
was post-modern in respect to a Spartan, as a Spartan was modern at the times
of the Spartans), information Age, both producer and consumer feel no sense of Quality in the products they make and
use, which includes the music industry, and thus the overall dullness of these
is overlaid with ‘style’ so as to make them acceptable. This only makes things
worse as now not only are the products – or in the case of the music industry,
the artists – dull (lacking in Quality)
but also false (stylized so as to be acceptable). So what we get, to use
Pirsig’s words, is “ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort
to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to
start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not
style.” I believe this best describes the state of the music industry at
present. However, this was not the aim of my dissertation.
In this
dissertation I was looking at the surge in new business strategies that have
evolved since the Napster trial in 2001 in the distribution of music through
the Internet: iTunes, Myspace and Radiohead. As for the question of creativity,
I will pursue it solely for a personal understanding in the hope of always
striving for the all-important, omnipresent Quality.
Reference
Pirisig, R.M.
– Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle
Maintainance: An Inquiry Into Values – HarperTorch – 1974 – New York
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