The great co-product

"Music", so claims Nicholas Cook, is the great industrial sham, the flamboyant pretender that masquerades itself as a singular, spatialized locus. Instead, Music has never been so wedded to the condition of it being a "co-product" as it has been today, or arguably so, even more today. Music and its scholastically illegitimate co-product scions have enacted such a sublime job keeping our eyes affixed on the nefarious empty goal which music purports itself to be, that we have failed to recognize the subliminal but equally powerful accomplices. Everything from the CD sleeve to the packaging and the glossy-finish on the latest MTV can now be reigned in for analysis, following Cook's proposal. That is, if we truly believe that the "peverse core" (to enact contextual rape on Zizek's phrase) of music is indeed an entirely unassimilable (and henceforth empty) endeavour. But Zizek's assertions emanate from the proposition that "empty" does not necessarily been content-less. Emptiness can be equated to that of a seamless brick, whose inside/outside binary falls into complication because of its coherence of the parts to the whole. The emptiness of the signified merely points to the fact that there can be no final signified for the chain of signifiers, and hence a chain literally in constant orbit about the frustrating kernel of the imagined signified. Thus that kernel, by virtue of throwing the signifiers into centripetal confusion, fail to come close to even attending to the core-in-and-of-itself. These chains of co-products likewise gravitate in motion about the perverse core of music, which stubbornly resists total absorption into the realm of the Symbolic, and can only be maintained by phantasy of its unified, total realm that precisely seeks to abolish the focus on its co-productive agents at hand.