An Unsound Investment

“The only thing you can do for capitalism --
we protest inadequate everything --
is to try to bring it down”
-Bruce Andrews, “The Millennium Project”

One of art’s great virtues is its capacity to be unsound. Its irrationality follows a logic dissonant with “rationality”; art exposes “rationality” as a social construct, masked as an objective truth. Such “rationality” is in the service of power relations; inadequacies are papered over with it—the familiar gestures, “there are no inadequacies” or “there is no other possible way”. Art offers an alternative; it is a terrain where freedom can be glimpsed.

Art, therefore, is extremely dangerous. Insidiously, art’s consciousness-conditioning techniques have been appropriated for the reinforcement of the dominant ideology; the techniques inhabit every work of artifice, from a newspaper to television to the Internet. It is dangerous in a fruitful way—dangerous to the constructors of falsity and deficiency—in its potential to be iconoclastic, contributing to the revealing of sheer semblance, which leads towards a more maximal consciousness.

KDVS has the potential to engage with and be this kind of art. It has a strong theoretical structure that enables its activities. The noncommercial and volunteer characteristics form a resistance to the market as a dominating influence. The community-control—KDVS is very open to community participation, governs itself, and rests upon support by the community—resists a smothering authoritarianism.

Freed from such constraints, this structure contributes to the development of KDVS’s DJ autonomy and plurality of creativity. KDVS is irrational compared to every other station on the dial. The intelligently deployed experimentation and radicalism loosed by KDVS’s structure opens up fascinating and challenging territories. Furthermore, the plurality of creativity destroys the notion of a single “right way”—there is not a “KDVS sound” but “KDVS sounds.” People are widely various, and the shows reflect that; testing ideas, music, and politics by throwing them into a melee is more freeing and enlightening than the reinforcement of a single side. KDVS’s theory and practice are its own resistance to itself. Its irrationality and very form is political.

It is not to be forgotten that KDVS and all of us are caught up in the conditions of commodity production—money is made a condition of continuing existence. Recognizing the coercion, KDVS calls on the community in order to continue its operations. Community support is essential to resisting a theoretical backsliding, such as submitting to commercial interests, that would manifest itself in the practice, such as the dumbing down of content. The exchange—a monetary “investment” by the community exchanged for KDVS’s liberating use-values and not for profit—is truly an “unsound” investment by our society’s logic, and why it is so important.