The Wish Image And The Romantic/Capitalist Artist Analysis

The Wish Image and the Romantic/Capitalist Artist
As I noted in Chap.ter 3Two, the conflict between technology and artist is a capitalist conflict, and accordingly will not be satisfactorily resolved except outside of capitalism, through substantial social reorganization. But what can Gaddis’s discussion of the outmoded player piano finally tell us about the relationship between new music technologies and musicians? Agapē Agape suggests that we should not ignore or underestimate the extent to which new technologies of music playing and dissemination become occasions for the collective to dream of a world without the capitalist artist. Indeed, Gaddis’s most enduring contribution to the study of music technology may be to identify the hostility
It is this wish that radio, gramophone, compact cassette and disc players, digital music players, and online streaming services unconsciously kept or keep alive, even as all of these devices make their appeal consciously as commodities through dreams of pleasure, leisure, convenience or audio fidelity. Technology allows the collective to think against the Romantic myth of the artist, to dismantle the deceptive rhetoric that uses this artist to apologize for and to perpetuate capitalist practices. The wish image surrounding music technology is centrally positioned to challenge this Romantic legacy and to dream of a better world, one without this kind of artist. It can wish for a world in which the antagonistic conditions so central to the posture of the Romantic artist are dissolved, and the need for the artist along with them. Indeed, what is there to stop the wish image from imagining a world so ideal that the consolations and pleasures of art itself would be obsolete? Paul K. Saint-Amour, “Ulysses Pianola,” PMLA 130.1 (January 2015), 16. David Suisman, “Sound, Knowledge, and the ‘Immanence of Human Failure’: Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano,” Social Text 28.1 (Spring 2010),
Roehl, Player Piano Treasury: The Scrapbook History of the Mechanical Piano in America, Second Edition (Vestal: Vestal Press, 1973), 23. Ibid., 47. Ibid. Ibid. Steven Moore, “The Secret History of Agapē Agape,” in Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers, Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 258. Rone Shavers, “The End of Agapē: On the Debates around Gaddis” in Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers, Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 170. Michael Wutz, “Writing from between the Gaps: Agapē Agape Twentieth-Century Media Culture” in Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers, Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 202. Joseph Tabbi, “Afterword” to William Gaddis, Agapē Agape (New York: Penguin, 2003), 107. Wutz, “Writing from between the Gaps,” 206. Tabbi, “Afterword,”