There was, it must have been a year or two ago, a thread that I encountered, and it filled me with despair, so antisocial was the topic, were the words, written by many and directed at nothing at all. The topic asked people to imagine their ideal album through the use of genre tags, or, more mechanically, to generate their idea of the perfect album as a list of genres. My first instinct was to think these users may not be living if they already know what their ideal is. My second was to suspect them of misunderstanding both genre and basic causality. I tend to think of genre as something listeners, archivists, marketers, and historians retroactively apply to existing works, for the purpose of classifying and making sense of what, at a close enough distance, reveals individual heterogeneity. Without an artwork, the classifier signifies nothing. The thread, I reasoned, was a twenty-first century rerun of a postmodern cliche: How is it possible to love an empty sign? It continued to nag at me however, as the understanding of postmodernism I'd used to set aside the issue was fixed to the mid-to-late twentieth century, and I knew that I would need to look to the twenty first. These users are not passively accepting pastiche, but actively assembling it through the use of an online music database.
Cultural critic Hiroki Azuma finds an explanation for twenty-first century patterns of consumption in, of all things, a footnote in the second edition of Alexandre Kojeve's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947), added twenty years after it was originally published. In this late footnote Kojeve writes that the end of history has freed humankind from itself, allowing it to finally live in "harmony with Nature," in a "return to animality," which is to say, in the absence of the struggle that has always defined the human subject. The standard model of desire, revolving around lack and the need for intersubjective relays (87), dissolves with our "becoming animal": our complex desires are replaced by animal needs, and our needs are satisfied by the immediate access to cultural products granted by late capitalism (86). Azuma argues we now engage with cultural products through a "database model" (31), in which we individually search for and combine signifiers that have long ceased to point to any reality, deriving instant satisfaction from their combination. Desire and its attendant struggle for meaning, and the artwork as an expression of reality, are both dissolved when cultural products become a question of access, and access becomes the means by which to satisfy consumer needs. All that's left is the user, alone at the computer, satisfied in the combination of empty signs. This picture of animalisation could be the end, but it's not. In what follows I insist the real is still yet divulged through our encounter with generic signs. I then argue that the artwork is always empty, and in this emptiness lies the fate of the human subject which, and I know this is unfashionable, needs to be defended against cultural-industrial trends to end desire.
Beginning with the real means returning to and the genre-scepticism I admit to possessing above. I said the artwork precedes genre, but it's more complex than that. I'm guilty of a formalist impulse to put too much on the artwork at the expense of audience, artist, and context. I think it was Eileen Southern who wrote that the artists responsible for inventing the blues could not have conceived of the genre we have since codified. There are a few points made within this simple statement: the artwork indeed precedes its generic classification, but the artwork in the first instance emerges from very real material conditions, the ongoing expression of material conditions in art comes to be codified as genre, and artists working in genre then iterate on what's come before. To explore this further I'll relay parts of Paddy Scott's excellent piece On Genre Tourism, an essay that does not spare bourgeois formalists like myself from reproach. Paddy bemoans the way that listeners will use genre to turn musical discovery into "a kind of stamp collecting exercise," in which any dialogue between listener, artist, time, and place is closed off. What emerges in its place is the immediacy of a consumer receiving the object of their desire, stripped of the material conditions underlying its construction. This abstraction alienates listeners and makers alike, he writes. Paddy's stamp collectors have a lot in common with Azuma's database animals. But where Azuma describes in abstract terms a cultural mindset sanded down by end of history comforts, Paddy is more concrete. Things begin and end for Paddy at the level of the social. According to him, forgetting about the social grounding of music leads to 1) an individualistic and superficial relationship to human expression where art is converted into content (and listener consumer), 2) the un-learning of peer-to-peer music sharing, discussion, and knowledge-building so that a feedback loop between the individual user and algorithm can take its place, and 3) the evacuation of discovery. He articulates well the material, cultural, and historical basis for genre as social, and underscores the significance of iteration in artistic expression. It bears emphasising that iteration sets the conditions for expression, but the work is required to give it shape. Genre without work is still nothing.
I've loved Paddy's essay since I first read it, but I've found new points of emphasis since encountering the thread, and now I read it in conversation with Azuma's database. Paddy worries that in the pattern above, listeners-as-consumers become "uncritical of the structures that inform and define their modes of musical discovery." In hindsight I do find Azuma guilty of believing in a kind of naive freedom possessed by his database animals: with the database at their disposal, they are free to search up and combine the empty signifiers that will satisfy their needs. What Paddy reminds us is that the database, the search function, and the selection of available signifiers are not neutral, but possess their own logic, designed to reproduce a certain kind of consumer-listener. Streaming services market themselves on the kind of animalistic freedom described by Azuma, but their reality is much different. In thinking that we miraculously find the content to satisfy exactly our needs, we lose track of the way that this us and its needs are in fact a byproduct of the system that sustains user, content, and the relationship between the two. This also clarifies something Azuma moves past too quickly, which is the way that transforming desires into needs eliminates our need for the other. The structures that define our musical discovery derealise the artists responsible for producing the music we find, and the listeners with whom we could interact, build community, share knowledge, and produce art. The stream presents the human being as an obstacle between the user and the content that it needs. The implication of this antisocial enclosure underpins Paddy's essay: the necessity of uncertainty in discovery. Other people are unpredictable, other people surprise us, other people reveal to us what we didn't already know. In the feedback loop between user and algorithm, what the listener thinks they already know is reinforced ad nauseum.
The recognition of uncertainty as a requisite of both discovery and the social is, I think, everything here. I worried about the participants in the thread because they demonstrated the kind of chilling certainty that comes from one having decided to do without other people. They are certain they already know what they want, that a genre tag will deliver exactly what they expect it to, and that what they receive will exactly meet their existing needs, rather than challenge, change, or open up some new avenue they could not have conceived of prior to encountering the work. Any new artwork would be dead on arrival, because the listening subject, unchanging, is already dead. I was struck by the obvious this week, which is that the thread might've depressed me because it read as a long line of GenAI prompts. It goes without saying that the most interesting thing GenAI can do is hallucinate, and that when it runs as-designed it's an appallingly expensive, destructive means of reproducing consensus and obsequiously reinforcing the predispositions of its users. It is, in other words, a certainty-machine, and the most recent reflection of antisocial capitalism's attack on uncertainty. In The Neganthropocene (2018), the late Bernard Stiegler implores us to reject entropic systems: closed systems that burn materials to reproduce homogeneity of thought (54). By contrast, he writes, "Knowledge is an open system: it always includes a capacity for dis-automatization that produces negentropy" (51-52). Knowledge for Stiegler is invariably social, and structured around the ongoing revelation of its incompleteness (45). A corrective to the dead finitude of antisocial listening begins with restoring the social, and reinstalling uncertainty as the prerequisite for any notion of discovery.
As things wrap up here it's worth admitting that much of my concern assumed the listener-consumers in the thread would be satisfied with the arrival of their ideal album. I'm no longer sure this is the case. Azuma makes a point of separating 'desire' from 'needs' when explaining animalisation. Only the human has desires, he writes, and consumer capitalism has freed us of this burden. Azuma uses a distinction made by Jacques Lacan, and threads it through Kojeve's division between animal and human desire. For Lacan, 'need' relates to the Freudian 'instinct': "an intermittent tension which arises for purely organic reasons and which is discharged entirely by the specific action corresponding to the particular need in question" (Evans 1996, 125). 'Desire' by contrast is something that can never be satisfied. It emerges from the 'lack' felt within the desiring subject, and it survives our every attempt to 'fill' it with the objects we pursue. If we did not lack, we would not desire, and if we did not desire, we would not be human, and so for our desires to become needs we would have to forgo the play of desire that makes us human. We would need to cede lack, transforming the object of desire into the object of mundane biological need, and our subjecthood into a thing of pure biology. Azuma is correct that capitalism promises to eliminate lack (and thereby desire), but whether total animalisation is actually possible is debatable.
In Distillations (2018), the late Mari Ruti writes that neoliberal capitalism is "psychically appealing (...) because it plays into the basic structure of desire by promising that it can replace a state of scarcity by a state of satiated abundance" (94). It makes us aware of our lack, and then promises a solution to this deprivation in immediate access to consumer goods (96). In other words it actively persuades us that our desires can become needs. The solution offered by Ruti lies not in replacing this illusion of abundance with another, but in refusing to yield desire to the satisfaction of needs. Because human subjectivity emerges from the lack that cannot be cured, we should become conscious of, and appreciate, that true joy can only arise in our confrontation with ontological lack, pain, and deficiency (100). I'll explain more of what this looks like shortly. In Todd McGowan's Out of Time (2011), the author relays the basic idea that desire requires an obstacle between the desiring subject and the object they believe will satisfy their desire. This obstacle may once have been time, but the speed of digital technology has eliminated the temporal distance. McGowan writes that through the use of digital technology we are regularly exposed to the emptiness of the object (27). In Azuma's model of the database, the empty object satisfies the animalised non-subject. But for McGowan and Ruti there remains a subjective excess that recognises this emptiness, and this attests to the presence of desire, however much it may have dwindled. If this is the case, then the user generating their 'ideal album' will realise that the actual cannot meet the ideal upon encountering it. In the past one might have set out to find this 'ideal album', and experienced a long and confusing detour through works that challenged and changed them, before long either forgetting what this 'ideal' was supposed to look like, or developing a new 'ideal' in light of new experiences. GenAI as a certainty-machine eliminates the meaningful detour, and because of the structure of human subjectivity it is concurrently a disappointment-machine, revealing the emptiness of what's generated through even the most bespoke generic prompts. The album cannot satisfy the user's narcissistic satisfaction, because the subject, however much they may long for it, cannot be completed so long as they are alive.
We have already covered how these systems obscure the work of the artist, which I would argue is part of a wider trend in subjective infantilisation, in which the artist is positioned as a soon-to-be unnecessary obstacle on the consumer's path to the content they want. And we've already inferred the denial of uncertainty that belies this, which is that the work produced by another can never be exactly what we want. I'd like to point out the concomitant: the work can never be exactly what the artist wants it to be either, and it's for this reason that art is a meaningful dialogue between makers, audiences, and works. They are all defined by lack, no party is ever complete. Ruti writes of 'singularity' as the surplus reality that escapes all systems of symbolic exchange. It "can never be fixed into a steady configuration of attributes, but rather communicates something about the volatility of the constant process of composing and recomposing a self that, by definition, characterizes the human predicament" (9). Our ontological lack prohibits us from finite resolution, and this irresolution is who we are. The artist comes from this deficit to articulate the idea in the signs of their chosen medium. Just as the subject cannot be fixed, the work will always fall short. The artist's work is never done. Even the anonymous artists in Paddy's essay, so devoted to iterating on the recognisable limits of genre, must in some way have failed to achieve the ideal if their works are discernible from others. This failure is testament to the singularity that contours and makes tangible the world before us. The artwork is always imperfect, always lacking, and it's this lack that speaks to us over any notion of perfectibility.
Returning to why we should not yield desire means differentiating between the desire to end desire, and to perpetuate it. The former, which is promised by capitalism, leads to a kind of death. But even that is a death that cannot be completed. The latter leads to the kind of unsettled madness that comes with embracing uncertainty, and that is needed for a meaningful life, and a meaningful engagement with art and with others. Ruti argues that "desire, far from resulting in self-closure, decenters the subject insofar as it centers on an object: the more important the object becomes, the more the subject is drained of its ego-bound cohesiveness" (2018, 114). When we love something, we love it not because it stabilises the idea we have of ourselves, but because it does the opposite, exposing us to and intensifying our lack, our contradiction, our uncertainty. It follows that what we love in something is not what can be named and justified in it, but what's "unnameable, unknowable, and inscrutable" about it (163), resisting our desire to possess and know it in its entirety. The poet and classicist Anne Carson unites the poet and their reader in the play of lack and desire. She writes "If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole" (1986, 30). If we were to ask, What is the real subject of our search for music? We would have to answer, Not the album, but the hole it illuminates and intensifies. We don't know what we want, but we know that we desire, and this is sufficient cause to step outside of ourselves, to talk and make and read and enjoy the fact of our desiring, uncertain as it may be.
4 August 2025